The Global Health Networks: A Comparative Analysis of Tuberculosis, Malaria and Pneumonia Using Social Media Data

Abstract

Global health networks (GHNs) of organizations fighting major health threats represent a useful strategy to respond to the challenge of mobilizing and coordinating different types of health organizations across borders toward a common goal. In this paper we reconstruct the GHNs of malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia by creating a new unique database of health organizations from the official Twitter accounts of each organization. We use a majority voter Multi Naive Bayes classifier to discover, among the Twitter users, the ones that represent organizations or groups active in each disease area. We perform a social network analysis (SNA) of the global health networks (GHNs) to evaluate the structure of the network and the role and performance of the organizations in each network. We find evidence that the GHN of malaria, TBC and pneumonia are different in terms of performance and leadership, geographical coverage as well as Twitter popularity. Our analysis validate the use of social media to analyze GHNs, their effectiveness and to mobilize the global community toward global sustainable development