Politico March 27, 2024
How we write our social media posts might reveal whether we’re depressed or anxious. But research methods for finding signs of depression in text don’t work across racial groups, according to a new report funded by the National Institutes of Health. The study is part of an effort by the agency to root out health misinformation among populations that experience higher averages of preventable disease.
Researchers analyzed 868 Facebook posts from people ages 18 to 72 with mild depression. Three-quarters of the posts were by women.
The researchers found that existing models for detecting depression from text performed poorly for Black participants. That remained true even when the algorithms were trained on language exclusively from Black participants.
Previous research has...
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