Let’s face it, we’ve all posted some cringey stuff on Facebook and then regretted it later.
But before you sheepishly delete said cringey stuff, it may be useful to keep your FB posts around because they could be the new frontier for diagnosing and treating disease.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have developed a way to use social media posts to predict diseases like diabetes, as well as mental health illnesses like anxiety, depression, and psychosis.
To develop this method, researchers used the Facebook histories and medical records of over 1,000 consenting patients and built a prediction model. Here’s how it works in a nutshell.
Your random day to day Facebook provide something of an insight into your behaviour, lifestyle, and mental state, info the doctor might not know about you. By analysing key words from your posts like symptoms and linking them to diseases and your medical history, this can help doctors figure out what’s ailing with you.
For example, if you’re the type of person who uses “drink” or “drunk” a lot in your posts, you’re probably a raging alcoholic. If your posts have a lot of swear words and are quite angry, that’s a sign you’ve probably done one too many drugs.
There are also some weird correlations that made no sense, like those who use religious words such as “god” and “pray” a lot were 15 times more likely to have diabetes. Go figure.
While this seems like a medical breakthrough of sorts, there’s a big problem with it.
This method requires doctors to basically Facebook stalk you. With Facebook already hoarding your phone numbers, having personal info like your address and medical records attached to your profile creates a big privacy risk.
Combine the thought of your doctor combing through all the embarrassing stuff you’ve posted on Facebook with the possibility of insurance companies wanting access to your profile so they can set premiums based on your posts, is having a doctor reading your Facebook posts worth it?
Thankfully, we’re still awhile away from doctors Facebook stalking you. The method is still in its early stages. Despite promising results, the study was only performed at one medical centre in which over three-quarters of participants were female and 71% were Black.
This means more data from a variety of places is needed to verify if this method actually works and isn’t just some wild coincidence between words and symptoms. Seriously, they need to explain that religious words/diabetes link.
Doctors also have to follow strict guidelines when it comes to private info so they’ll need your consent if this Facebook post thing ever becomes an actual thing. And even then, there’s the whole murky area involving privacy laws in individual countries that govern whether this sort of thing is even allowed.
So if you’re not too keen on having your doctor trawling through your Facebook profile in order to figure out what’s wrong with you if/when this method comes into play at some point in the future, consider wiping everything and going off the grid for a little bit.