What I really find worrying is that all this knowledge gets locked up behind the facebook walled garden. Essentially giving them a monopoly on processing this information. I understand why the doctors do it (use something that's available). But as another poster mentioned, we really need something better.
Do you really find it all that worrying, more so than the virus itself? I'm not a FB apologist but the fact that they have this network affect and that doctors can use it for free is outstanding. This would not have happened 20 years ago.
The kicker is that this isn't really news for anyone who works in the realm of open science, information dissemination, digital archiving and so on.
If you think salvaging information from social media is a challenge, consider how much gets lost in e-mail or byzantine folder structures on shared drives, or legacy document management systems, usb drives or personal laptops.
The value of information isn't just determined by it's relevancy or "usefulness" in a particular context, but also by it's level of accessibility and discoverability.
Moreover, let's not forget that a huge amount of that information is noise and only a fraction of that will converge in peer reviewed science down the line. And that's how human communication and sharing of information usually works.
Not everything needs to be kept or archived on the spot "just in case". That's just not feasible.
Indeed. It seems that Facebook's network effect is at play here. As a platform, it is playing a massive role in communication and information sharing in an epidemic.
Perhaps when this is all over some sort of open-collaboration framework should be devised for medical professionals (assuming one doesn't exist?). Also, someone could quite easily take the information from Facebook and put it somewhere else that's more accessible. Facebook groups are closed, right?
That's really one of those theoretical views. Nobody at Facebook is sitting there right now checking for the cure in the comments in order to start production of a vaccine at Facebook. In reality it is as open as it can be.
What's really worrying is that decades after the WWW started as a project for researchers to share their findings, Facebook is the best way to do this.
It s probably for the best. You dont want twitter crowds shutting down conversations and leading to analysis paralysis because every intervention is risky. I would go even further and say the records of these groups should be deleted after months, so as not to become lawsuit material months down the road
