JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Oral ulcers are a common condition affecting a considerable proportion of the population, often associated with trauma and stress. They are recurrent, very painful, and interfere with eating. Usually considered an annoyance, people may turn to social media for potential options. Facebook is one of the most commonly accessed social media platforms and the primary source of news information, including health information, for a significant percentage of American adults. Given the increasing importance of social media as a source of health information, potential remedies, and prevention strategies, it is essential to understand the type and quality of information available on Facebook regarding oral ulcers.

Objective:

The goal of our study is to evaluate the presence of information of recurrent oral ulcers accessed via the most popular social media network, Facebook.

Methods:

We performed keyword searching of Facebook pages on two consecutive days in March 2022, using duplicate, newly created accounts and then anonymized. The collected pages were filtered using pre-defined criteria to include only English language pages that include oral ulcer information posted by the general-public and excluded pages by professional dentists, associated professionals, organizations, and academic researchers. The selected pages were then screened for page origin and Facebook Categories.

Results:

Our initial key word search yielded 517 pages, however, interestingly only 22% had information relevant to oral ulcers and 72% of pages had irrelevant information with ulcer being mentioned in relation to other parts of the human body. Excluding the professional pages and pages with no relevant posts, resulted in 26 pages. We found that of these, 30% were categorized as health and beauty or as product/service; 10% as medical/health and 17% as community. Further, over 70% of the pages originated from six countries with most from the United States followed by India. There was little information on prevention of oral ulcers, long-term treatment, and complications.

Conclusions:

The primary use of Facebook in oral ulcer information dissemination appears to be as an adjunct to a business enterprise, for marketing or enhancement of access to a product. Consequently, not surprisingly, there was little information on prevention, long-term treatment, and complications of oral ulcers. Although we made efforts to identify and select Facebook pages related to oral ulcers, we did not manually verify the authenticity or accuracy of the pages included in our analysis. This could potentially limit the reliability of our findings or may be biased towards specific products or services. While this work forms something of a pilot project, we plan to expand the project to encompass text mining for content analysis as well as including multiple social media platforms in the future. Clinical Trial: Not applicable