World Cancer Day - using social media to inspire change

By Jennifer Lovick

World Cancer Day is a day to inspire change, mobilize people to take action, and create a world without cancer. This includes an emphasis on personal commitment and the power of individual action. Social media is one such avenue to achieve this.

As Executive Editor of the open access journal Cancer Control, a journal whose mission is to advance all aspects of cancer control (prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment, and palliative care), I am excited to share research content that highlights how useful social media can be to empower, educate, and impact the public on issues central to preventing, treating, and recovering from cancer.

In the last year, Cancer Control has published a series of research emphasizing social media’s role in the cancer control field. Social media has the capacity to encourage conversations and action by the public. In one study, by Vos et al., they showed that celebrity tweets on a specific cancer type can lead to increased attention and awareness surrounding that cancer, increased information seeking, and increased prevention and control behaviors. Notably, the authors suggest that cancer communicators can use these kinds of announcements as opportunities for shaping and continuing Twitter conversations to encourage users to engage with each other and engage in prevention and control behaviors. Social media is also an important avenue for communicating with the public health-related information that empowers the public to make more informed decisions related to cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.  Amith et al. , found that young adults who use Reddit, for example, had a very specific understanding of how the HPV vaccine works and a lack of understanding in how it can impact them and prevent cancer. The importance of this kind of understanding will enable researchers and cancer communicators to think about how best to frame messaging regarding the HPV vaccine for young adults in order to encourage them to consider getting the vaccine. That being said, social media can also provide a lot of misinformation about cancer for patients, family members, and caregivers. Gage-Bouchard et al., addressed this very issue by looking at how caregivers of pediatric patients use social media networking sites to find cancer-related information. While social media can be a wealth of information and serve as a primary source of obtaining cancer-related information, especially for caregivers, it is important that clinicians take the time to discuss with caregivers as well to clarify misinformation and give caregivers the opportunity to corroborate their findings on social media. Bottom line, social media is a powerful tool for cancer communicators to engage, empower, and encourage the public to increase not only their own personal awareness, but awareness in others, moving us all forward to a cancer-free world.

References

Amith, M., Cohen, T., Cunningham, R., Savas, L. S., Smith, N., Cuccaro, P., … Tao, C. (2020). Mining HPV Vaccine Knowledge Structures of Young Adults From Reddit Using Distributional Semantics and Pathfinder Networks. Cancer Control. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073274819891442

Gage-Bouchard, E. A., LaValley, S., & Devonish, J. A. (2019). Deciphering the Signal From the Noise: Caregivers’ Information Appraisal and Credibility Assessment of Cancer-Related Information Exchanged on Social Networking Sites. Cancer Control. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073274819841609

Vos, S. C., Sutton, J., Gibson, C. B., & Butts, C. T. (2019). Celebrity Cancer on Twitter: Mapping a Novel Opportunity for Cancer Prevention. Cancer Control. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073274819825826

 About the journal

Cancer Control  (IF 1.990) is a JCR-ranked, peer-reviewed open access journal whose mission is to advance the prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment, and palliative care of cancer by enabling researchers, doctors, policymakers, and other healthcare professionals to freely share research along the cancer control continuum. Our vision is a world where gold-standard cancer care is the norm, not the exception. A journal which is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

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