The Need for “Health Twitteracy” in a Postfactual World

• Main Author: Kristine Sørensen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SLACK Incorporated 2017-06-01
• Series: Health Literacy Research and Practice
• Subjects: social media; health literacy
• Online Access: https://www.healio.com/public-health/journals/hlrp/2017-4-1-2/%7Be3f04f40-0b86-440a-b0ff-6bd90f1da811%7D/the-need-for-health-twitteracy-in-a-postfactual-world

Social media is increasingly playing a critical role for direct communication. One such example is Twitter, which is an online social media networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets.” Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. The conversations on Twitter are often formed around hashtags (#) that can enable connections between people, foster the effective sharing of ideas, and help entire online communities form and flourish. As the fastest growing social media site (McCue, 2013), Twitter allows, for instance, organizations to communicate with a target audience and many other people by posting short messages without a significant amount of effort. The built-in mechanism with regards to the concise format and limited length pushes toward simplifying messages to the benefit of users; however, there are also pitfalls. At times, tweets can be impossible to understand because of jargon and abbreviations; tweets can also be misleading and dangerous and potentially drown everyone in a deluge of information. Yet, if building on principles of clear communication, tweets can also be meaningful and informative and emerge as important topics that become trends through retweeting and thus facilitate the flow of information by virtue of a dynamic and evolving ecology of networks (Park, Rodgers, & Stemmle, 2013).