Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Oct 7, 2021
Date Accepted: Nov 25, 2022
Comparison of the users’ attitudes towards cannabidiol on social media platforms: Content analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
As one of the major constituents of the cannabis sativa plant, cannabidiol (CBD) is being approved for use in medical treatment and cosmetics because of its potential health benefits. With the rapid growth of the CBD market, customers are purchasing these products and relevant discussions are becoming more active on social media.
Objective:
To understand the users’ attitudes toward CBD products in various countries, we conducted text mining on social media from China and Western countries.
Methods:
We collected posts from Reddit and Xiaohongshu and conducted topic mining by the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, and we analyzed the characteristics of topics on different social media. Then the 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 towards CBD products in China and Western countries by Chi-square test.
Results:
CBD-related posts were rapidly increasing on social media, 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 two social media were categorized into seven topics and eight topics by the LDA model, and these topics on two social media were grouped into five themes, respectively. Our study showed that the themes on Reddit were mainly about the therapeutic effects of CBD, while the themes on Xiaohongshu concentrated on the cosmetics, such as facial masks. Theme-2 (CBD market information) and Theme-3 (Attitudes towards 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 (30.87%). Meanwhile, Theme-1 (CBD cosmetics) on Xiaohongshu had various connections with others (44.19%) and the co-occurrence frequency of Theme-4 (CBD ingredients) and Theme-1 was relatively prominent (55.01%). Overall, users’ comments tended to be positive for CBD-related information in both Reddit and Xiaohongshu, but the percentage was higher on Xiaohongshu (82.25% vs. 86.18%, p<0.001), especially in cosmetics and medical healthcare products.
Conclusions:
The CBD market has grown rapidly, and the topics related to CBD on social media became active, and there are apparent differences in users’ attitudes towards CBD in China and Western countries. Policymakers should formulate management rules for CBD products and regulate the CBD market. While social media should exercise their professional responsibility to ensure accurate information on CBD is published and disseminated.
Citation
The author of this paper has made a PDF available, but requires the user to login, or create an account.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.