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Several disease-specific information exchanges now exist on Facebook and other online social networking sites. These new sources of knowledge, support, and engagement have become important for patients living with chronic disease, yet the quality and content of the information provided in these digital arenas are poorly understood.

To qualitatively evaluate the content of communication in Facebook communities dedicated to diabetes.

We identified the 15 largest Facebook groups focused on diabetes management. For each group, we downloaded the 15 most recent “wall posts” and the 15 most recent discussion topics from the 10 largest groups.

Four hundred eighty unique users were identified in a series of 690 comments from wall posts …