JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The rapid, unchecked proliferation of harmful digital content, misinformation, disinformation, and malicious cyber-social constructs, across globally networked populations constitutes one of the defining public health crises of the twenty-first century. Existing frameworks for studying information spread remain largely descriptive and surveillance-oriented, lacking the conceptual infrastructure to model, predict, and guide intervention at scale.

Objective:

This paper proposes Digidemiology as a transdisciplinary field, and articulates its conceptual foundations that relies on defining a systematic framework that imports and translates the theoretical tools of infectious disease epidemiology into the domain of harmful digital content. We situate Digidemiology in relation to infodemics and infodemiology, introduce a formal vocabulary of digital epidemiological constructs, and establish the fundamental distinction between somatic and psychic infection outcomes as the field's ontological foundation.

Methods:

We undertake a conceptual synthesis across epidemiology, cognitive neuroscience, network science, and public mental health. We introduce systematic construct mapping between classical epidemiological concepts and their digidemiological analogues, develop a five-level psychic morbidity spectrum, and derive a set of theoretical insights concerning algorithmic virulence, echo chamber dynamics, digital immune escape, cognitive superspreading, and the temporal compression of digital epidemic cycles.

Results:

Digidemiology is distinguished from infodemiology by its focus on harmful digital entities specifically, its mechanistic orientation, and its positioning of psychological harm, anxiety, depression, epistemic learned helplessness, radicalisation, and vicarious trauma, as primary outcomes of a modellable disease process. Five theoretical frontiers are identified that generate novel, actionable insights for platform governance, content moderation strategy, digital literacy policy, and public mental health.

Conclusions:

The conceptual framework of Digidemiology transforms the study of harmful digital content from an informational interest into a public health science of great importance. It provides the taxonomic, ontological, and theoretical scaffolding upon which formal mathematical models, can be built and calibrated. The field is emerging and urgent, and this article constitutes its foundational conceptual statement. Clinical Trial: N/A