Which social media platforms facilitate monitoring the opioid crisis?

Abstract

Social media can provide real-time insight into trends in substance use, addiction, and recovery. Prior studies have used platforms such as Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), but evolving policies around data access have threatened these platforms' usability in research. We evaluate the potential of a broad set of platforms to detect emerging trends in the opioid use disorder and overdose epidemic. From these, we identified 11 high-potential platforms, for which we documented policies regulating drug-related discussion, data accessibility, geolocatability, and prior use in opioid-related studies. We quantified their volume of opioid discussion, including in informal language by including slang generated using a large language model. Beyond the most commonly used Reddit and X/Twitter, the platforms with high potential for use in opioid-related surveillance are TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. Leveraging a variety of social platforms, instead of merely one, yields broader subpopulation representation and safeguards against reduced data access in any single platform.

Fig 1. Platform shortlisting consort diagram.

Consort diagram of iterative exclusion criteria to attain shortlist of 11 social media platforms for further characterization.

Fig 2. Total hits for each of the shortlisted platforms.

Shown with a logarithmic scale. Platforms are clustered into three categories by volume of hits, shown by color (darker shade of blue indicates higher volume of hits). Dotted line shows y = x diagonal. a) Total hits for formal opioid term list versus the sum of the total hits for the informal opioid term list and the algospeak opioid term list. b) Total hits for informal opioid term list versus algospeak opioid term list.

Fig 3. Term hits normalized by number of hits for common nouns.

Shown with a logarithmic scale and scaling factor of 100,000. As in Fig 2, platforms are clustered into three categories by total volume of hits, shown by color (darker shade of blue indicates higher volume of hits). Dotted line shows y = x diagonal. a) Normalized hit ratios for formal opioid term list versus for informal opioid term list and algospeak opioid term list. b) Normalized hit ratios for informal opioid term list versus algospeak opioid term list.