For the past 10 years, informal surgical education has increasingly gone virtual. No doubt, the benefits of #SoMe4Surgery have been overwhelmingly positive, but with caveats:
Privacy concerns
There’s a big difference between privacy and security. Something can be secure but not private. For example, a house made completely of glass can have a really big lock and a moat surrounding it (making it secure) but obviously anyone on the outside can still see everything going on. Secure but not private.
Platforms not purpose-built
Current social platforms are designed for the masses: short blurbs of text, rapid dopamine surges, and quick input of data. What they’re not designed for is to get data back out. They are not well suited for longer form text or categorization in a logical way of items like operative videos, port placement diagrams, or discussions around peer-reviewed publications. Also, there’s no good way to allow higher value / impact comments to be prioritized and the less impactful ones to be suppressed.
Personal data sold
In 2016, Facebook lost personal data of over 55 million of users to a firm called Cambridge Analytica. This was instrumental in swaying the 2016 US presidential election. The issue they had was that they not only allowed third party developers to develop software within the ‘walls’ of their platform, but they unapologetically collected users’ personal data to create profiles on who they would likely vote for. Sadly, this hasn’t stopped as of the publication of this article. And to be clear, Facebook isn’t the only one that does this. X, TikTok, Google, etc do the same to monetize their platforms.
The Netflix movie The Social Dilemma did a fantastic job covering this issue. If you’re not buying a product, then you are the product. Surgeons have quite literally become the product along with the rest of the population.
Posts not categorizable
You can tweet all you want, post on Facebook easily, but try and get those posts out for reference a few months later. Nearly impossible. If you happened to remember the person who posted on that topic, or a keyword that was used, it might improve your chances to get that reference back, but it’s a far cry from a pleasant experience. Videos cannot be tagged with operative steps. Products cannot be linked to their use in a video / post.
