fairness, engagement, and discourse analysis in ai-driven social media and healthcare
abstract
this thesis addresses the critical concerns of fairness, accountability, transparency, and
ethics (fate) within the context of artificial intelligence (ai) systems applied to social media and healthcare domains. first, a comprehensive survey examines existing research on
fate in ai, specifically focusing on the subdomains of social media and healthcare. the
survey evaluates current solutions, highlights their benefits, limitations, and potential
challenges, and charts out future research directions. key findings emphasize the significance of statistical and intersectional fairness in ensuring equitable healthcare access
on social media platforms and highlight the pivotal role of transparency in ai systems
to foster accountability. building upon the survey, this thesis delves into an analysis of
social media usage by healthcare organizations, with a specific emphasis on engagement
and sentiment forecasting during the covid-19 pandemic. data collection from twitter handles of pharmaceutical companies, public health agencies, and the world health
organization enables extensive analysis. natural language processing (nlp)-based topic
modeling techniques are applied to identify health-related topics, while sentiment forecasting models are employed to gauge public sentiment. the results uncover the impact
of covid-19-related topics on public engagement, highlighting the varying levels of engagement across diverse healthcare organizations. notably, the world health organization exhibits dynamic engagement patterns over time, necessitating adaptable strategies.
the thesis further presents latest sentiment forecasting models, such as autoregressive
integrated moving average (arima) and seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average with exogenous factors (sarimax), which enable organizations to optimize their
content strategies for maximum user engagement. furthermore, discourse analysis is
conducted to unravel the factors that shape the content of tweets by healthcare organizations on twitter. [...]