The American Diabetes Association (ADA) is making changes to their social media policy ahead of this year’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida, in June, in a bid to avoid the controversy they found themselves mired in last year.
Attendees of the 2017 conference in San Diego, California, were restricted from posting any photos or information from speaker sessions to their social media accounts per official ADA policy.
Conference goers did not react well to the ban, immediately taking to Twitter to express anger and frustration over the seemingly draconian constraints. Many said they regarded the rule as an unethical attempt to maintain a monopoly on data and educational effort.
“Those in power are counting on you to NOT speak up & to comply. Stop deleting, Start tweeting, Don’t be thanked for ur compliance,” C Michael Gibson, MD, an interventional cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts, tweeted several times during ADA last year to his more than 300,000 Twitter followers. His posts received brisk engagement that expressed universal agreement with his views.
The flood of negative reactions dominated Twitter conversations about the conference. The phrases “Freethetweet,” “ludditeofthemonth,” and “freedomoftweech” were just as often associated with the conference’s official hashtag, #2017ADA, as phrases like “insulin,” “mortality,” and “changingdiabetes,” according to the Twitter analytics site keyhole.co.
Speakers Will Have the Final Say
This year, the ADA will allow speakers to have the final say on whether or not to allow attendees to tweet and post from the presentations.
“Photography will be at the discretion of each study author and will be announced by each author at the start of their presentation. Each author will verbally state and visually confirm in a slide whether they approve of photos being taken of their slides or not.
The ADA asks all attendees, including members of the media, to be respectful of the study author’s announcement: “Please respect the scientist and his/her work,” reads an official statement posted on the organization’s website.
“There will be a separate communication going out to authors about their responsibility to inform everyone in the session room, both verbally and visually, at the start of their presentation as to whether or not they are allowing photos,” Michelle Kirkwood, ADA senior communications director, said in an email to Medscape Medical News. She added that signage will also be advertising the new policy throughout the Orlando venue.
Gibson said he thinks this is a fair compromise, stating, “It is tremendous to see that the ADA will now allow the public sharing of educational and scientific content while respecting the rights of those individuals who do not wish to share.”
The ADA’s hesitation to allow images and tweets of author sessions is understandable, said Louis Aronne, MD, an endocrinologist and the Sanford I. Weill Professor of Metabolic Research at the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Cornell Weill in New York City.
“The problem is that many of the best journals prohibit release of findings to the ‘mass media’ prior to peer review and publication,” Aronne pointed out.
“If you were a journal editor, what would you do? If a paper is already out there in the media, it diminishes the newsworthiness when it is eventually published.”
Social media takes control out the hands of the author because it transforms everyone with a mobile phone and a Twitter account into a potential reporter, Aronne notes. Authors may be less likely to present new and important findings if they are concerned doing so will diminish the chances of acceptance into a top journal. Publishing papers on the same day they are presented at the meeting can prevent conflicts, he suggested.
However, not all publications deem social media posts a concern. “Online posting of an audio or video recording of an oral presentation at a medical meeting, with selected slides from the presentation, is not considered prior publication,” according to the guidelines for The New England Journal of Medicine.
And crucially, journal publication ensures one vitally important addition: peer review. The fact that something has been reported at a meeting and/or featured in a news report does not necessarily mean it has stood up to rigorous review by a panel of experts in that field, as will be the case if it is formally published.
The ADA is hoping the rule change presents a compromise that balances the rights of authors with the realities of social media sharing.
“This was a lengthy and thoughtful process, and our goal was to reach a workable solution for all — protecting the intellectual property rights of the researchers, while allowing the authors who would like to share their data slides to do so,” said Linda Cann, the association’s senior vice president, professional services and education.
With these changes, perhaps #RespectTheScientist will be the upcoming conference’s trending hashtag.
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