Medical Schools and Social Media: A Look at Their Role in Fighting Inequality

Medical schools have a big job. They need to help fix unfair treatment in healthcare. They can do this by talking about social justice online. Social media is a great place to reach lots of people. One way to understand this is through something called critical consciousness. This means seeing unfairness in society and doing something about it. Researchers wanted to see if medical schools in Canada were using this idea on X (formerly Twitter). They looked at tweets from all Canadian medical schools between March and June 2023. Out of 3442 tweets, only 554 showed signs of critical consciousness. That's about 16%.The most common topic was empowering marginalized groups. But there was little talk about intersectionality, which is the idea that people face multiple forms of discrimination. The way medical schools talked about these issues was interesting. They often used positive words like "celebrate" and "recognize" to highlight equity-deserving individuals. But they didn't talk much about their own role in systemic power differences. This is a missed chance. Medical schools could use social media to have deeper conversations. They could build trust with the public by showing they understand their part in the problem.