World Health Organization Releases Taxonomy for Monkeypox Social Listening

Sep 27, 2022 | News

The World Health Organization (WHO) developed public health taxonomy for social listening on monkeypox conversations to better understand how the multi-country outbreak of monkeypox is perceived, understood and discussed. WHO intends the taxonomy to be used to monitor the millions of conversations related to monkeypox within thematic categories relevant to public health response and help identify structure and changes in narratives. The taxonomy can be applied to online social media listening, as well as for offline social listening and can facilitate structured integrated analysis of the data to produce infodemic insights and recommendations.

The taxonomy spans across five categories of topics of conversations: 

  1. The cause – how did the virus emerge and how is it spreading? 
  2. The illness – what do we know about the disease, what are the symptoms and how is it transmitted? 
  3. The treatment – How can it be cured? 
  4. The interventions – What is being done by authorities and institutions? 
  5. Conversations about information – Meta-conversation about guidance, reporting, misinformation and content 

A flexible taxonomy for monkeypox will allow countries to quickly identify and organize questions, concerns, information voids, narratives and mis/disinformation from across different data sources – which will in turn allow for a more systematic and routinized approach for data collection and analysis.

Read more and download the full taxonomy at the World Health Organization.