Characterizing Transgender Health Issues in Twitter

Although there are millions of transgender people in the world, a lack of information exists about their health issues. This issue has consequences for the medical field, which only has a nascent understanding of how to identify and meet this population's health-related needs. Social media sites like Twitter provide new opportunities for transgender people to overcome these barriers by sharing their personal health experiences. Our research employs a computational framework to collect tweets from self-identified transgender users, detect those that are health-related, and identify their information needs. This framework is significant because it provides a macro-scale perspective on an issue that lacks investigation at national or demographic levels. Our findings identified 54 distinct health-related topics that we grouped into 7 broader categories. Further, we found both linguistic and topical differences in the health-related information shared by transgender men (TM) as com-pared to transgender women (TW). These findings can help inform medical and policy-based strategies for health interventions within transgender communities. Also, our proposed approach can inform the development of computational strategies to identify the health-related information needs of other marginalized populations.

Characterizing Diseases and disorders in Gay Users' tweets

A lack of information exists about the health issues of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people who are often excluded from national demographic assessments, health studies, and clinical trials. As a result, medical experts and researchers lack a holistic understanding of the health disparities facing these populations. Fortunately, publicly available social media data such as Twitter data can be utilized to support the decisions of public health policy makers and managers with respect to LGBTQ people. This research employs a computational approach to collect tweets from gay users on health-related topics and model these topics. To determine the nature of health-related information shared by men who have sex with men on Twitter, we collected thousands of tweets from 177 active users. We sampled these tweets using a framework that can be applied to other LGBTQ sub-populations in future research. We found 11 diseases in 7 categories based on ICD 10 that are in line with the published studies and official reports.