Social Media — A Soothsayer?
Social media posts are being used to predict behavior and even illnesses.
FOX News Radio’s Jessica Rosenthal reports.
Doctor Sean Young heads up UCLA’s Center for Digital Behavior. He brought researchers together to figure out…
(Dr. Young) ”How can we use social data to predict events in health and medicine, business, politics and social welfare.”
It’s already worked. They had people join online communities to talk about HIV and getting tested, and people ended up sharing a lot of personal information. So, they started collecting and filtering through millions of tweets about sexual risk behavior, and their locations, and put them all on a map.
(Dr. Young) “The places where people are having these conversations are the same places where we’re finding outbreaks of HIV.”
He says health organizations are obviously interested in this, but so are cyber security experts and the military.
Jessica Rosenthal, FOX News Radio.
