Social Media Analytics for Health

Theme overview

Our work in social media analytics for health utilizes a number of methodologies - Natural Language Processing (NLP), qualitative analysis, social network analysis - to extract insights from data sources like Reddit, Twitter/X, Facebook, and online health discussion forums.  Previous work has focused on investigating public attitudes towards vaping and hookah use using Twitter/X and online discussion forums, automatically identifying psychosocial risk factors associated with depression from Twitter/X, exploring written communication challenges experienced by individuals with mental health disorder using online discussion forums, and more recently automatically identifying substance use-related stigmatizing content from Reddit discussions and identifying trends in the conceptualization of ADHD and autism on Reddit.

Publications

  • Park A, Conway M, Chen AT. Examining thematic similarity, difference, and membership in three online mental health communities from Reddit: a text mining and visualization approach. Comput Human Behav. 2018 Jan;78:98-112. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2017.09.001. Epub 2017 Sep 6. PMID: 29456286; PMCID: PMC5810583.
  • Chen L, Robinson R, Conway M.  What Do You Meme?--Identifying Characteristics and User Perceptions of Suicide Memes in Social Media.  Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 2025. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v19i1.35822
  • Chen AT, Johnny S, Conway M. Examining stigma relating to substance use and contextual factors in social media discussions. Drug Alcohol Depend Rep. 2022 May 5;3:100061. doi: 10.1016/j.dadr.2022.100061. PMID: 36845987; PMCID: PMC9948814.
  • Kang J, Haslam N, Conway M. Converging Representations of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism on Social Media: Linguistic and Topic Analysis of Trends in Reddit Data. J Med Internet Res. 2025 May 20;27:e70914. doi: 10.2196/70914. PMID: 40392589; PMCID: PMC12134697.
  • Myslín M, Zhu SH, Chapman W, Conway M. Using Twitter to examine smoking behavior and perceptions of emerging tobacco products. J Med Internet Res. 2013 Aug 29;15(8):e174. doi: 10.2196/jmir.2534. PMID: 23989137; PMCID: PMC3758063.

Theme members

Contact details

Dr Mike Conway
Email: mike.conway@unimelb.edu.au