Giving Compass' Take:

• Researchers at the University of Michigan in Detroit are probing connections between health outcomes and how communities tweet about food.

• How do these tweets correlate with poverty and income in neighborhoods? 

• Here's an article on agricultural neighborhoods that are popping up in Detroit,

Twitter’s impact on public health has been under the microscope in recent years, as research suggests the social media platform may cause information overload, fuel anxiety, and enable harassers. But what about Twitter’s ability to provide meaningful data on public health outcomes at the community level? Researchers are now using it as a tool to explore correlations between the way various communities talk about food on social media and their overall health outcomes.

Since 2016, Dr. Vinod Vydiswaran, a professor at the University of Michigan, has been working on a project aimed at understanding how food-related discussion on Twitter could be useful in reducing differences between health outcomes in various communities. Initiatives focused on changing our behaviors around food and nutrition require meaningful, timely, and—most important, local—information to be effective. So, Vydiswaran wanted to know whether Twitter could be a valid source for neighborhood-level data points about our dietary choices and attitudes.

But divining meaningful public health data from the global swamp of 280-character tweets is not as simple as typing “bacon” into the search bar and analyzing the results, of course.

Read the full article about Twitter monitoring neighborhood health by H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy.