Take Not a Musket to Kill a Butterfly: Ensuring the Proportionality of Measures Used in Disease Control on the Internet

Social media applications such as Facebook hold great promise as means of communicable disease control. We argue here that the use of social media in communicable disease control may cause various forms of harm, and that these harms are aggravated by some of the very same features making social media attractive in the attempt to control disease. We point to alternative measures of disease control and further argue that although disease control may be the primary task of health practitioners, there is no good reason why the choosing of the least invasive measures in terms of privacy and confidentiality should not also be a key
priority.