Advantage of social media over traditional surveys is the immediate accessibility of data. Analyzing opioid-related social media posts has the potential to reveal patterns of opioid abuse at a national scale, and understand opinions of the public and opioid users. We have performed various analysis on social media, including spatial-temporal trends of opioid use, content analysis, types of users and their background, and suicide intention.

References:

• Hannah Yao, Sina Rashidian, Xinyu Dong, Hongyi Duanmu, Richard Rosenthal and Fusheng Wang: Detection of Suicidality Among Opioid Users on Reddit: Machine Learning–Based Approach. Journal of Medical Internet Research. Vol 22, No 11 (2020): November.
  
  
• Sheetal Mangesh Pandrekar, Xin Chen and Fusheng Wang: Social Media Based Analysis of Opioid Epidemic Using Reddit. In Proceedings of AMIA 2018 Annual Symposium. San Francisco, November 3-7, 2018.
  
  
• Sheetal Mangesh Pandrekar, Manish Valakonda, Xin Chen and Fusheng Wang: Towards Spatial Analysis of Opioid Abuse Using Twitter. In AMIA Annual Symposium, November 4-8, 2017, Wasington DC, USA.