#Healthy Selfies: Exploration of Health Topics on Instagram.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Social media provides a complementary source of information for public health surveillance. The dominate data source for this type of monitoring is the microblogging platform Twitter, which is convenient due to the free availability of public data. Less is known about the utility of other social media platforms, despite their popularity.

Objective

This work aims to characterize the health topics that are prominently discussed in the image-sharing platform Instagram, as a step toward understanding how this data might be used for public health research.

Methods

The study uses a topic modeling approach to discover topics in a dataset of 96,426 Instagram posts containing hashtags related to health. We use a polylingual topic model, initially developed for datas

SUBMITTER: Muralidhara S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6045785 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature