Samuel Lim Zhi An, 16

School: St. Joseph’s Institution

Topic: Can social media make a positive impact on organ donation?

Award: Merit, Senior Category, 2023

The impacts of social media on organ donation

“The power of social media is that it forces necessary change,” as per American author Erik Qualman, citing the positive impacts of social media. Following social media’s rising prominence in today’s world, those who champion modern causes are now armed with these dynamic new platforms to raise awareness for their respective interests. This is particularly true of organ donation, defined as the process where a person’s healthy organ is removed and transplanted to another person consensually. Through social media, this cause has reached the screens, and subsequently, resonated with the hearts of billions of people daily, facilitating en masse transplants of organs by suitable donors to recipients who need them most. With regard to this, social media can indeed make a positive impact on organ donation, due to its innate use for raising public awareness of organ donation along with helping transplant candidates find suitable organ donors. However, the use of social media to impact organ donation is not all rosy, as it could threaten the confidentiality of both recipients and donors alike.

One reason for the widening gap between organ demand and donation is the sheer lack of awareness regarding organ donation. Using social media to promote awareness of organ donation has been of paramount importance in the attempt to bridge this gap. Social media has made a profoundly beneficial effect on organ donation due to its employment in raising public awareness regarding organ donation. Proponents of social media in the transplant community praise its propensity of reaching out to a large, global and collective audience daily. By raising the profound issue of organ donation internationally, informants of organ donation can rapidly transcend national boundaries while learning about the issue, perhaps even before more traditional news outlets get wind of it. Moreover, hearing about the pitiful plights of organ transplant candidates inexorably evokes sympathy in potential organ donors - especially when considering that such stories posted on social media are typically more authentic, being first-hand accounts from unfortunate laymen, unedited and uncensored by corporations or governments. For instance, the recipient of the The Straits Times Singaporean of the Year Award in 2021, Mr Sakthibalan Balathandautham, was swayed, while checking his Instagram messages, by the heart-wrenching account of Mr Sunil Jayakumar and Ms Ruthra Saravanan, when their year-old daughter Rhena was diagnosed with biliary atresia and in urgent need of a liver transplant. Following a social media post to look for a suitable liver donor, word was spread by the couple’s social circle and even local celebrities who aired interviews to raise awareness about the couple’s situation. Mr Sakthibalan chanced upon the Instagram post, resolving to save a life at stake, and passed his donor suitability test and various other administrative work before undergoing the transplant procedure where he donated 23% of his liver to help Rhena make a speedy recovery. Thus, bridging the awareness gap between transplant candidates and the greater public, more potential donors can be identified to mitigate the issue of excess demand for organs.

Furthermore, social media serves as a catalyst for transplant candidates to find suitable organ donors. Arguably the most pressing issue transplant candidates face is the arrant rarity of suitable organs available for transplant. Due to the rigorous registration process for the few interested in becoming registered organ donors, which factor in their age, overall health and medical history, coupled with the inexorable risk of the candidate’s immune system rejecting the foreign organ, the chances of a transplant candidate matching with an ideal organ donor are few and far between. With the ability to match suitable transplant candidates to suitable donors, social media has significantly elevated said chances. A salient example is Facebook, the brainchild of billionaire entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg and the world’s most popular social media network by a margin of roughly half a billion monthly active users. With nearly 3 billion said users this year alone, it has cemented itself as an immensely popular channel for families of organ transplant candidates and transplant support groups to solicit kidneys, livers, hearts, and numerous other lifesaving organs. In May 2012, the platform started offering its 150 million users at the time the ability to indicate their organ donor statuses and share it with their extended friend networks. Upon identifying as an organ donor, users were provided with a link to their state organ registry in the United States to officially register their organs for donation. This resulted in much research into how Facebook was used to connect donors with recipients, including a study done by researchers from the Loyola University Medical Center. The experts reported at a meeting of the National Kidney Foundation that they targeted ninety-one Facebook pages seeking urgent kidney donations for patients aged two to sixty-nine. Promisingly, their findings showed that 42% of users behind the pages reported that their patient beneficiaries had either received a kidney transplant or were approached by potential donors thanks to the use of Facebook as a means of locating suitable organ donors. This proves that social media is vital in helping to find suitable organ donors.

Conversely, social media can also pose an ominous threat to the confidentiality of both the transplant candidate and donor. Due to the trademark anonymity of social media platforms, the limit to which credible information such as the type of organ, location of the donor or registration credentials falls entirely into the will of the donor. In many cases where donors were recently pronounced as deceased, recipient data lacking identifiable details were more frequent on social media pages as compared to recipient information published by established transplant hospitals. Living donors without any previous relationship with their recipient may also wish to maintain anonymity, which can be easily compromised by the volatility of social media, especially when the post becomes viral and involves widespread dissemination of what should be a person-to-person message. For instance, according to the aforementioned study into the efficacy of Facebook in matching transplant candidates with suitable organ donors, the range of how much personal information disclosed on donors’ Facebook pages was tremendous. While some pages simply asked people to donate organs without providing additional information, others provided abundant details about the patients, including past medical records along with first-hand accounts that lamented their hospital stay, emergency operations and the sheer difficulty of living on dialysis, as per Alexander Chang, nephrology fellow at Loyola University. To combat this lack of privacy, which can be deleterious especially in a high-stake situation like urgently saving a person in need of an organ, users should develop proficiency in identifying credible pages detailing specific pointers about the individual’s situation, such as past medical records verified by medical institutions and openness to discussing the organ donation and transplantation process further. By doing so, the risk of proceeding with a false dealing of organ transplantation can be greatly mitigated, allowing social media to have an even more positive impact on organ donation.

To conclude, many cases have demonstrated the power of a single click on social media when said click is accompanied by more from a great many other individuals worldwide. While a significant proportion of individuals passively receive and pass on information on social media platforms, a substantial number are willing to do more than just spread news. However, the extra mile that such people are willing to go with regard to organ donation may also harm the privacy and confidentiality of both the transplant candidate and donor alike. Despite the potential threat social media can pose to the aforementioned privacy, its role in exponentially boosting the matching of suitable donors to patients cannot be discounted, thus, I believe that social media has indeed impacted organ donation positively due to the sheer rise in viable organ transplants successfully negating the confidentiality issue raised by social media’s pronounced lack of privacy.

References

1. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/liver-donor-in-singapore-answers-online-plea-helps-baby-he-has-never-met

2. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/social-media-appeals-lead-to-more-liver-transplants-from-strangers

3. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/facebook-organ-donation/

4. https://www.newswise.com/articles/study-examines-how-patients-use-facebook-to-solicit-kidney-donors

Disclaimer: Please note that the views and opinions expressed in the essays for the Live On Festival 2023 are those of the participants and are not endorsed by the National Organ Transplant Unit (Ministry of Health). To learn more about organ donation and organ transplantation in Singapore, please visit www.liveon.gov.sg