ArticleJournal of general internal medicine2021
State Legislators' Divergent Social Media Response to the Opioid Epidemic from 2014 to 2019: Longitudinal Topic Modeling Analysis.
Article in Journal of general internal medicine, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
14 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- SciComm Optimizer for Policy Engagement: a randomized controlled trial of the SCOPE model on state legislators' research use in public discourse.Implementation science : IS · 2023Trial
- Anti-Latine bias and drug-induced homicide law support: Evidence from a nationally diverse, randomized survey experiment in the United States.The International journal on drug policy · 2026Article
- Prevalence, Themes, and Partisan Differences in US State Legislator X Posts Mentioning Suicide: Content Analysis.JMIR formative research · 2026Article
- Automated Risk Assessment of Opioid Use: Analysis Using Pre-Trained Transformers on Social Media Data.JMIR infodemiology · 2026Article
- Firearm Violence and Health in Policymaker Discourse: Mixed Methods Social Media Analysis.JMIR formative research · 2025Article
- Which social media platforms facilitate monitoring the opioid crisis?PLOS digital health · 2025Article
- Medicaid Managed Care Prior Authorization For Buprenorphine Tied To State Partisanship And Health Plan Profit Status, 2018.Health affairs (Project Hope) · 2024Article
- State Legislator Social Media Posts About the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.JAMA network open · 2023Article
- State and Federal Legislators' Responses on Social Media to the Mental Health and Burnout of Health Care Workers Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic: Natural Language Processing and Sentiment Analysis.JMIR infodemiology · 2023Article
- Partisan differences in the effects of economic evidence and local data on legislator engagement with dissemination materials about behavioral health: a dissemination trial.Implementation science : IS · 2022Article
- Expert views on state-level naloxone access laws: a qualitative analysis of an online modified-Delphi process.Harm reduction journal · 2022Article
- Policy Makers' Priorities for Addressing Youth Substance Use and Factors That Influence Priorities.Psychiatric services (Washington, D.C.) · 2022Article
- Association Between Crowdsourced Health Care Facility Ratings and Mortality in US Counties.JAMA network open · 2021Article
- Partisan Differences in Legislators' Discussion of Vaccination on Twitter During the COVID-19 Era: Natural Language Processing Analysis.JMIR infodemiologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe opioid epidemic is widely recognized as a legislative priority, but there is substantial variation in state adoption of evidence-based policy. State legislators' use of social media to disseminate information and to indicate support for specific initiatives continues to grow and may reflect legislators' openness to opioid-related policy change.
objectiveWe sought to identify changes in the national dialogue regarding the opioid epidemic among Democratic and Republican state legislators and to estimate changing partisanship around understanding and addressing the epidemic over time.
designLongitudinal natural language processing analysis.
participantsA total of 4083 US state legislators in office between 2014 and 2019 with any opioid-related social media posts. MAIN MEASURES: Association between opioid-related post volume and state overdose mortality, as measured by Kendall's rank correlation coefficient. Latent Dirichlet allocation analysis of all social media posts to identify key opioid-related topics. Longitudinal analysis of differences in the prevalence of key topics among Democrats and Republicans over time. KEY
resultsIn total, 43,558 social media posts met inclusion criteria, with the vast majority to Twitter (n=28,564; 65.6%) or Facebook (n=14,283; 32.8%). Posts were more likely to mention fentanyl and less likely to mention heroin over time. The volume of opioid-related content was positively associated with state-level unintentional overdose mortality among both Democrats (tau=0.42, P<.001) and Republicans (tau=0.39, P<.001). Democrats' social media content has increasingly spoken to holding pharmaceutical companies accountable, while Republicans' social media content has increasingly spoken to curbing illicit drug trade. Overall, partisanship across topics increased from 2016 to 2019.
conclusionThe volume of opioid-related social media posts by US state legislators between 2014 and 2019 is associated with state-level overdose mortality, but the content across parties is significantly different. Democrats' and Republicans' social media posts may reflect growing partisanship regarding how best to address the overdose epidemic.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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.