One Health in social networks and social media

In the rapidly evolving world of social media, social networks, mobile applications and citizen science, online communities can develop organically and separately from larger or more established organisations. The One Health online community is experiencing expansion from both the bottom up and the top down. In this paper, the authors review social media’s strengths and weaknesses, earlier work examining Internet resources for One Health, the current state of One Health in social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and online social networking sites (e.g. LinkedIn and ResearchGate), as well as social media in One Health-related citizen science projects. While One Health has a fairly strong presence on websites, its social media presence is more limited and has an uneven geographic distribution. In work following the Stone Mountain Meeting, the One Health Global Network Task Force Report recommended the creation of an online community of practice. Professional social networks as well as the strategic use of social media should be employed in this effort. Finally, One Health-related research projects using volunteers (citizen science) often use social media to enhance their recruitment. Including these researchers in a community of practitioners would take full advantage of their existing social media presence. In conclusion, the interactive nature of social media, combined with increasing global Internet access, provides the One Health community with opportunities to meaningfully expand their community and promote their message.