JMIR Infodemiology

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms became major channels for public health communication and public sensemaking, but they also enabled the rapid circulation of rumors, false claims, conspiracy narratives, and misleading health information. Research on online COVID-19 misinformation expanded rapidly during the peak pandemic period, yet the evidence base was fragmented across public health, computing, communication, and information science.

The health care polycrisis in Canada comprises several concurrent crises, namely workforce shortages; food insecurity; housing stress; and health inequities affecting Indigenous peoples, low-income families, and racialized communities. A scalable infoveillance system is needed to monitor these related but distinct crises concurrently using natural language processing (NLP) and statistical forecasting.

Vitreous floaters are a prevalent phenomenon, with some patients experiencing persistent symptoms that substantially degrade their vision. Public interest and information-seeking behavior regarding vitreous surgery are challenging to quantify using claims alone.

Public health agencies increasingly use social media platforms such as Twitter (subsequently rebranded X, X Corp) to monitor public responses to official health communications and support timely decision-making during health crises. Public replies to communications from official agencies provide valuable insights into population-level discourse and engagement with health policies. However, analyzing large-scale short-text responses remains challenging because social media replies are often brief, informal, ambiguous, and linguistically fragmented. Topic modeling offers a scalable approach for identifying thematic patterns in such data, but its performance is often limited when applied to social media short texts. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) provide new opportunities to improve text normalization before topic modeling, but their value and limitations for public health infoveillance remain underexplored.

Patients with seizure clusters and their families often use YouTube videos as resources for information about the illness and how to use concomitant rescue medications; however, many videos include misinformation or incorrect information that could potentially cause harm.

As Singapore enforces a comprehensive e-cigarette prohibition, this infodemiology analysis of vaping-related X (formerly Twitter) discourse reveals predominantly neutral, event-driven discussions across 18 topics covering legislation and policy, illicit consumption, illicit sales and smuggling, and health risks, offering insights to inform vaping control strategies.

Public discourse plays an important role in shaping how end-of-life care and medical decision-making are understood within society. In South Korea, the implementation of the Life-Sustaining Treatment Decision Act in 2018 established a legal framework for withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment for patients at the end of life. However, relatively little is known about how public discourse surrounding life-sustaining treatment has evolved over time, particularly before and after the act’s implementation.

Alcohol is a leading contributor to disease and injury worldwide; yet, it remains embedded in cultural practices associated with pleasure, social connection, and emotional relief. While global research has documented both the epidemiological burden and the social meanings of drinking, little is known about how alcohol-related meanings are circulated and normalized within African social media environments.

Suicidal ideation is a significant global public health concern, with family abuse recognized as a key risk factor. Although clinical studies have examined the link between family abuse and mental health, its representation in social media discussions—particularly in relation to suicidal ideation—remains largely unexplored.

One of the multiple challenges associated with misinformation is its risk of hindering public health efforts during a health crisis. Misinformation can cover a diversity of thematic topics and is usually spread using a series of nontopic-specific recurring narrative structures. Identifying these 2 misinformation features helps to understand underlying structures and patterns through which misleading information can take shape or be circulated.

The rapid evolution of the nicotine and tobacco product (NTP) marketplace continues to outpace existing research. Although adolescents are active participants on social media who both consume and generate content, this age group has rarely been included in analyses of NTP content, raising a methodological challenge for accurate interpretation and coding of youth-oriented NTP content. Most research examining oral nicotine product content online has focused on TikTok, despite YouTube’s widespread adolescent use. One promising framework is the vertically integrated project (VIP) model. Situating content analysis within the VIP model suggests the methodological potential of age-diverse teams to capture nuances in social media data coding, reveal areas of interpretive divergence, and ultimately advance research methodologies in public health.

The global rise of K-pop has shaped youth culture and online communities, particularly through BTS, a South Korean boy band with an international fanbase known as ARMY (Adorable Representative MC for Youth). Music fandoms are increasingly engaging with digital platforms such as YouTube not only for entertainment but also as spaces for emotional expression and mutual support. Despite growing interest in the mental health potential of music-based coping strategies, limited research has examined how fandom cultures differentially express emotional needs and supportive interactions online.