Analysis Of Facebook Posts Better At Predicting Diabetes & Mental Health Problems Than Demographic Information

An analysis of social media posts on the Facebook platform found that status updates predicted diabetes and mental health conditions including anxiety, depression, and psychoses. The posts were more accurate than demographic variables at predicting 18 disease categories.

These findings were reported in “Evaluating The Predictability Of Medical Conditions From Social Media Posts” by Raina M. Merchant, David A. Asch, Patrick Crutchley, Lyle H. Ungar, Sharath C. Guntuku, Johannes C. Eichstaedt, Shawndra Hill, Kevin Padrez, Robert J. Smith, and H. Andrew Schwartz. The researchers analyzed 949,530 Facebook status updates containing 20,248,122 words across 999 participants whose posts . . .