Firsthand Opiates Abuse on Social Media: Monitoring Geospatial Patterns of Interest Through a Digital Cohort

Abstract

In the last decade drug overdose deaths reached staggering proportions in the US. Besides the raw yearly deaths count that is worrisome per se, an alarming picture comes from the steep acceleration of such rate that increased by 21% from 2015 to 2016. While traditional public health surveillance suffers from its own biases and limitations, digital epidemiology offers a new lens to extract signals from Web and Social Media that might be complementary to official statistics. In this paper we present a computational approach to identify a digital cohort that might provide an updated and complementary view on the opioid crisis. We introduce an information retrieval algorithm suitable to identify relevant subspaces of discussion on social media, for mining data from users showing explicit interest in discussions about opioid consumption in Reddit. Moreover, despite the pseudonymous nature of the user base, almost 1.5 million users were geolocated at the US state level, resembling the census population distribution with a good agreement. A measure of prevalence of interest in opiate consumption has been estimated at the state level, producing a novel indicator with information that is not entirely encoded in the standard surveillance. Finally, we further provide a domain specific vocabulary containing informal lexicon and street nomenclature extracted by user-generated content that can be used by researchers and practitioners to implement novel digital public health surveillance methodologies for supporting policy makers in fighting the opioid epidemic.

Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference (WWW '19)

References in corpus (3)

• A Web of Hate: Tackling Hateful Speech in Online Social Spaces
• All Who Wander: On the Prevalence and Characteristics of Multi-community Engagement
• Query Expansion with Locally-Trained Word Embeddings

Cited by in corpus (6)

• No Echo in the Chambers of Political Interactions on Reddit
• Patterns of Routes of Administration and Drug Tampering for Nonmedical Opioid Consumption: Data Mining and Content Analysis of Reddit Discussions
• Ten Social Dimensions of Conversations and Relationships
• Collective response to the media coverage of COVID-19 Pandemic on Reddit and Wikipedia
• Multidimensional Tie Strength and Economic Development
• Location inference on social media data for agile monitoring of public health crises: An application to opioid use and abuse during the Covid-19 pandemic