Can Social Media Predict When You’ll Die?
Can Social Media Predict When You’ll Die?
Can Social Media Predict When You’ll Die?
Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook collect a staggering amount of data points from us, so much data that our social media activity can pretty accurately reveal things from gym habits to the state of our mental well-being. But could social media data do more than just portray how healthy you are now? Could it predict how likely you are to be healthy in the future? I recently read an article discussing a Facebook patent related to algorithms that can predict major life changes, including death. To learn about this, I met up with Boston University data scientist Elaine Nsoesie, a BU School of Public Health assistant professor of global health and a data science faculty fellow at the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, who studies how digital information and social media can be used for infectious disease and public health surveillance. Based on her own data surveillance research, we talk about whether she thinks it’s feasible for social media data to tell us when we’ll die.
“Beyond The Brink” is an occasional one-on-one interview series where Kat J. McAlpine, the editor of BU’s The Brink website, tackles big questions about the human experience with BU researchers.
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