ArticleJMIR public health and surveillance2020
Exploring Substance Use Tweets of Youth in the United States: Mixed Methods Study.
Article in JMIR public health and surveillance, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social Media Use and Health and Well-being of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth: Systematic Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Pooled it
- Results from Project GOLD: A pilot randomized controlled trial of a psychoeducational HIV/STI prevention intervention for black youth.AIDS care · 2021Trial
- Scrolling into substance use: Social media use frequency and substance use among U.S. high school students.Drug and alcohol dependence reports · 2026Article
- Teenager Substance Use on Reddit: Mixed Methods Computational Analysis of Frames and Emotions.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Mobile phone ownership, social media use, and substance use at ages 11-13 in the ABCD study.Addictive behaviors · 2025Article
- "I Been Taking Adderall Mixing it With Lean, Hope I Don't Wake Up Out My Sleep": Harnessing Twitter to Understand Nonmedical Prescription Stimulant Use among Black Women and Men Subscribers.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- Digital Epidemiology of Prescription Drug References on X (Formerly Twitter): Neural Network Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Article
- Methods and Annotated Data Sets Used to Predict the Gender and Age of Twitter Users: Scoping Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Article
- Insights from the Twittersphere: a cross-sectional study of public perceptions, usage patterns, and geographical differences of tweets discussing cocaine.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Results and Methodological Implications of the Digital Epidemiology of Prescription Drug References Among Twitter Users: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Analyses.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- #Delta8: a retailer-driven increase in Delta-8 THC discussions on Twitter from 2020 to 2021.The American journal of drug and alcohol abuse · 2023Article
- Deciphering Latent Health Information in Social Media Using a Mixed-Methods Design.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Prevention of Alcohol Consumption Programs for Children and Youth: A Narrative and Critical Review of Recent Publications.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Using Twitter to Surveil the Opioid Epidemic in North Carolina: An Exploratory Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2020Article
- A Review of Recent HIV Prevention Interventions and Future Considerations for Nursing Science.The Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care : JANACReview
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundSubstance use by youth remains a significant public health concern. Social media provides the opportunity to discuss and display substance use-related beliefs and behaviors, suggesting that the act of posting drug-related content, or viewing posted content, may influence substance use in youth. This aligns with empirically supported theories, which posit that behavior is influenced by perceptions of normative behavior. Nevertheless, few studies have explored the content of posts by youth related to substance use.
objectiveThis study aimed to identify the beliefs and behaviors of youth related to substance use by characterizing the content of youths' drug-related tweets. Using a sequential explanatory mixed methods approach, we sampled drug-relevant tweets and qualitatively examined their content.
methodsWe used natural language processing to determine the frequency of drug-related words in public tweets (from 2011 to 2015) among youth Twitter users geolocated to Pennsylvania. We limited our sample by age (13-24 years), yielding approximately 23 million tweets from 20,112 users. We developed a list of drug-related keywords and phrases and selected a random sample of tweets with the most commonly used keywords to identify themes (n=249).
resultsWe identified two broad classes of emergent themes: functional themes and relational themes. Functional themes included posts that explicated a function of drugs in one's life, with subthemes indicative of pride, longing, coping, and reminiscing as they relate to drug use and effects. Relational themes emphasized a relational nature of substance use, capturing substance use as a part of social relationships, with subthemes indicative of drug-related identity and companionship. We also identified topical areas in tweets related to drug use, including reference to polysubstance use, pop culture, and antidrug content. Across the tweets, the themes of pride (63/249, 25.3%) and longing (39/249, 15.7%) were the most popular. Most tweets that expressed pride (46/63, 73%) were explicitly related to marijuana. Nearly half of the tweets on coping (17/36, 47%) were related to prescription drugs. Very few of the tweets contained antidrug content (9/249, 3.6%).
conclusionsData integration indicates that drugs are typically discussed in a positive manner, with content largely reflective of functional and relational patterns of use. The dissemination of this information, coupled with the relative absence of antidrug content, may influence youth such that they perceive drug use as normative and justified. Strategies to address the underlying causes of drug use (eg, coping with stressors) and engage antidrug messaging on social media may reduce normative perceptions and associated behaviors among youth. The findings of this study warrant research to further examine the effects of this content on beliefs and behaviors and to identify ways to leverage social media to decrease substance use in this population.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.