Drug companies may soon be required to tweet their products’ side effects

The FDA has proposed a new set of social media guidelines that will require drug companies to tweet their products’ side-effects to the world, reports The Wall Street Journal. Though still tentative, the proposal would make it so that all the benefits and the side-effects of a company’s products — even the most dangerous ones — will need to be condensed in single, 140 character tweet. If a firm “concludes that adequate benefit and risk information, as well as other required information, cannot all be communicated within the same tweet, then the firm should reconsider using Twitter for the intended promotional message,” the FDA wrote in the regulations.

After several years of anticipation, the FDA has finally proposed a pair of guidelines for how drug and device makers should cope with some of the challenges and pitfalls posed by social media. One of the so-called draft guidances offers instructions on how companies should attempt to correct product information on websites that are run by others, such as chat rooms. The otheraddresses how products – including risk and benefit information – can be discussed in venues such as Twitter, as well as paid search links on Google and Yahoo, all of which have limited space. This will involve using links to product web sites, for instances, that can be clicked. “These are intended to have a beneficial impact on public health,” Tom Abrams, who heads the FDA Office of Prescription Drug Promotion, tells us. “But these were not developed in a vacuum. They were developed with careful consideration and with input from industry and many other stakeholders. There was a lot of important consideration given to the issues.”