Comparison of the Users' Attitudes Toward Cannabidiol on Social Media Platforms: Topic Modeling Study

Abstract

Background: As one of the major constituents of the cannabis sativa plant, cannabidiol (CBD) is approved for use in medical treatment and cosmetics because of its potential health benefits. With the rapid growth of the CBD market, customers purchase these products, and relevant discussions are becoming more active on social media.

Objective: In this study, we aimed to understand the users' attitudes toward CBD products in various countries by conducting text mining on social media in countries with different substance management policies.

Methods: We collected posts from Reddit and Xiaohongshu, conducted topic mining using the latent Dirichlet allocation model, and analyzed the characteristics of topics on different social media. Subsequently, a co-occurrence network of high-frequency keywords was constructed to explore potential relationships among topics. Moreover, we conducted sentiment analysis on the posts' comments and compared users' attitudes toward CBD products on Reddit and Xiaohongshu using chi-square test.

Results: CBD-related posts on social media have been rapidly increasing, especially on Xiaohongshu since 2019. A total of 1790 posts from Reddit and 1951 posts from Xiaohongshu were included in the final analysis. The posts on the 2 social media platforms, Reddit and Xiaohongshu, were categorized into 7 and 8 topics, respectively, by the latent Dirichlet allocation model, and these topics on the 2 social media were grouped into 5 themes. Our study showed that the themes on Reddit were mainly related to the therapeutic effects of CBD, whereas the themes on Xiaohongshu concentrated on cosmetics, such as facial masks. Theme 2 (CBD market information) and theme 3 (attitudes toward CBD) on Reddit had more connections with other themes in the co-occurrence network, and theme 3 and theme 1 (CBD therapeutic effects) had a high co-occurrence frequency (22,803/73,865, 30.87%). Meanwhile, theme 1 (CBD cosmetics) on Xiaohongshu had various connections with others (169,961/384,575, 44.19%), and the co-occurrence frequency of theme 4 (CBD ingredients) and theme 1 was relatively prominent (27,128/49,312, 55.01%). Overall, users' comments tended to be positive for CBD-related information on both Reddit and Xiaohongshu, but the percentage was higher on Xiaohongshu (82.25% vs 86.18%; P<.001), especially in cosmetics and medical health care products.

Conclusions: The CBD market has grown rapidly, and the topics related to CBD on social media have become active. There are apparent differences in users' attitudes toward CBD in countries with different substance management policies. Targeted CBD management measures should be formulated to suit the prevalence of CBD use of each country.

Keywords: cannabidiol; drug policy; latent Dirichlet allocation; sentiment analysis; social media.

Figure 1

Flowchart of the study. LDA: Latent Dirichlet Allocation.

Figure 2

The number of posts on Reddit and Xiaohongshu per year.

Figure 3

Co-occurrence network of high-frequency keywords on Reddit and Xiaohongshu. (A) The nodes represent the keywords of the themes on Reddit. The edge between two nodes (source node and target node) indicates that two keywords appear in the same post, and the thickness of the edges indicates the frequency of co-occurrence in the posts. The color of the edge is consistent with that of the source node. Theme 1: CBD production treatment and effects. Theme 2: market information related to CBD products. Theme 3: attitudes toward CBD products. Theme 4: products and forms related to CBD. Theme 5: consumer-oriented CBD product format. (B) The nodes represent keywords of the themes on Xiaohongshu. The edge between two nodes (source node and target node) indicates that two keywords appear in the same post, and the thickness of the edges indicates the frequency of co-occurrence in the posts. The color of the edge is consistent with that of the source node. Theme 1: CBD-related cosmetic categories and functions. Theme 2: CBD-related cosmetic brands and research. Theme 3: effect evaluation of CBD products. Theme 4: main ingredients of CBD cosmetics. Theme 5: declared disease treatment effect. CBD: cannabidiol.

Figure 4

Co-occurrence heatmap of high-frequency keywords on Reddit and Xiaohongshu. The number is the frequency of co-occurrence between different themes, and the pie chart (blue part) indicates the proportion of one theme in all themes in each row. (A) The themes on Reddit—theme 1: CBD production treatment and effect, theme 2: market information related to CBD products, theme 3: attitudes toward CBD products, theme 4: products and forms related to CBD, and theme 5: consumer-oriented CBD product format. (B) The themes on Xiaohongshu—theme 1: CBD-related cosmetics categories and functions, theme 2: CBD-related cosmetic brands and research, theme 3: effect evaluation of CBD products, theme 4: main ingredients of CBD cosmetics, and theme 5: declared disease treatment effect. CBD: cannabidiol.

Figure 5

Sentiment distribution of posts on Reddit and Xiaohongshu. The horizontal coordinates indicate the subject classification of the post, and the vertical coordinates indicate the number of comments (positive posts used the number of positive comments, and negative posts used the number of negative comments).