Given the emancipatory power of social media, we propose recommendations and practical implications for leveraging the potential of online-sourced feminist epidemiology at different stages of the research process, and for increasing synergies between researchers and the community.

First, we recommend gathering insights from social media groups and hashtags. Groups and hashtags not only signify what really matters to people in terms of their health and how they form communities based on shared health experiences, they also make the gap between real-world concerns and research questions visible. Social media content is set to become an increasing part of digital epidemiology and can serve as a ground from which research questions can emerge. Respectful, invited and thorough analyses of online spaces would also serve as material for the comparison of researchers’ formulation of research questions with real-world priorities.

Second, we believe that social media feedback can be a precious contributor in a project’s pilot phase. Online spaces provide the perfect environment to invite feedback on data collection instruments and what those instruments mean to participants. Without asking for undue labour (or by giving due credit for the labour donated), a space could be carved for bottom-up shaping and refining of research instruments.

Third—and this approach is the most used so far, social media users can become themselves research participants. It is more and more common for researchers to recruit participants online, particularly for “hard-to-reach” or marginalised groups. However, there is still room to improve recruitment processes, so that they become really inclusive, more representative, do not objectify lived experience, and do not encroach on people’s safe spaces. Observing an ethics of the other that moves beyond procedural ethics and adopting research designs that facilitate continuous reflection and iterative consent (e.g. participatory research) allow for a non-othering approach [10]. This is particularly important in research with sexualised, ethnicised, or racialised groups whose subjectivities are underrepresented.

Fourth, we see potential in engaging with users on social media to disseminate research findings in a way that pays attention to patriarchal sociocultural contexts and power dynamics, mitigates risks for political recuperation (e.g. for research on abortion) and stigmatisation, and generates respectful discourse on studied populations.