Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Mar 19, 2020
Date Accepted: Aug 31, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
“I never thought I would live in an era where a #plant was the centre of such #controversy”: Geographic Differences in Cannabis Conversations on Twitter
ABSTRACT
Objectives: To examine differences in the sentiment and content of cannabis-related Tweets by state cannabis laws, and to examine differences in sentiment between the U.S and Canada.
Methods:
In total, 1,200,127 cannabis-related tweets were collected from January 1, 2017 to June 17 2019 using the Twitter application programming interface. Tweets then were grouped geographically based on cannabis legal status in the locations the Tweets came from. Sentiment scoring for the Tweets was done with VADER Sentiment, and differences in sentiment were tested using Tukey adjusted two-sided pairwise comparisons. Topic analysis to determine the content of Tweets was done using Latent Dirichlet Allocation in Python, using a Java implementation, LdaMallet, with Gensim wrapper.
Results:
Significant differences were seen in Tweet sentiment between U.S. states with different cannabis policies, as well as between the U.S. and Canada. In both cases, restrictive state policy environments were associated with more negative Tweet sentiment. Six key topics were found in recent Tweet content: fun and recreation; daily life; transactions; places of use; medical use and cannabis industry; and legalization. The keywords representing content of Tweets also differed between the U.S. and Canada. Practice implications: Knowledge about how cannabis is being discussed online, and geographic differences that exist in these conversations may help to inform public health planning and prevention efforts. Public health education about how to use cannabis in ways that promote health and minimize harms may be especially important in places where cannabis is legal for recreational and medical use. 3-Question Summary Box 1. What is the current understanding of this subject? Historically, Cannabis Tweet sentiment has been found to be more positive post-legalization and Tweet content has been examined for adolescents. 2. What does this report add to the literature? Restrictive state policy environments are associated with more negative cannabis Tweet sentiment across the U.S. and Canada. Key topics in Tweet content include: fun and recreation; daily life; transactions; places of use; medical use and cannabis industry; and legalization. 3. What are the implications for public health practice? Public health efforts to provide educational messaging on social media about how to use cannabis in ways that minimize harm may be especially important in places with less restrictive cannabis policy. Keywords: Marijuana; social media; sentiment; cannabis; Twitter
Citation
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Copyright
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