Abstract
Social media have allowed the scope and scale of biomedical research studies to greatly expand in the last decade. Now able to nearly reach entire populations via platforms like Facebook, researchers can explore new questions and recruit thousands in a matter of minutes. Social media can also help address challenges of longitudinal retention in research and enable researchers to identify participants years later for follow-up, as outlined in the article by Bhatia-Lin and colleagues in this issue, Bhatia-Lin and colleagues also discuss ethical and regulatory concerns with using social media platforms to locate and track research participants and offer an innovative rubric to guide ethical use of social media in biomedical research. We agree with their approach and here suggest expanding it to include other digital data, augmenting it to include data science and operationalizing it using computer science.