This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.
Twitter is a popular social media forum for sharing personal experiences, interests, and opinions. An improved understanding of the discourse on Twitter that encourages marijuana use can be helpful for tailoring and targeting online and offline prevention messages.
The intent of the study was to assess the content of “tweets” and the demographics of followers of a popular pro-marijuana Twitter handle (@stillblazingtho).
We assessed the sentiment and content of tweets (sent from May 1 to December 31, 2013), as well as the demographics of consumers that follow a popular pro-marijuana Twitter handle (approximately 1,000,000 followers) using Twitter analytics from Demographics Pro. This analytics company estimates demographic characteristics based on Twitter behavior/usage, relying on multiple data signals from networks, consumption, and language and requires confidence of 95% or above to make an estimate of a single demographic characteristic.
A total of 2590 tweets were sent from @stillblazingtho during the 8-month period and 305 (11.78%) replies to another Twitter user were excluded for qualitative analysis. Of the remaining 2285 tweets, 1875 (82.06%) were positive about marijuana, 403 (17.64%) were neutral, and 7 (0.31%) appeared negative about marijuana. Approximately 1101 (58.72%) of the positive marijuana tweets were perceived as jokes or humorous, 340 (18.13%) implied that marijuana helps you to feel good or relax, 294 (15.68%) mentioned routine, frequent, or heavy use, 193 (10.29%) mentioned blunts, marijuana edibles, or paraphernalia (eg, bongs, vaporizers), and 186 (9.92%) mentioned other risky health behaviors (eg, tobacco, alcohol, other drugs, sex). The majority (699,103/959,143; 72.89%) of @stillblazingtho followers were 19 years old or younger. Among people ages 17 to 19 years, @stillblazingtho was in the top 10% of all Twitter handles followed. More followers of @stillblazingtho in the United States were African American (323,107/759,407; 42.55%) or Hispanic (90,732/759,407; 11.95%) than the Twitter median average (African American 22.4%, inter-quartile ratio [IQR] 5.1-62.5%; Hispanic 5.4%, IQR 3.0-10.8%) and among Hispanics, @stillblazingtho was in the top 30% of all Twitter handles followed.
Young people are especially responsive to social media influences and often establish substance use patterns during this phase of development. Our findings underscore the need for surveillance efforts to monitor the pro-marijuana content reaching young people on Twitter.
Social media use is common among young persons. The majority of Internet users in the United States (72%) use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, and others [
The term “infodemiology” was coined by Eysenbach and underscores the communication patterns on the Internet that have important implications for the study of population health and public policy [
Like Facebook and MySpace, Twitter is a popular social media forum among youth and young adults [
Young people are responsive to social media influences and often establish substance use patterns during this phase of development [
The current study presents timely analysis of a popular Twitter handle that streams marijuana-related content. Marijuana is one of the most commonly used substances among young people in the United States. The US National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) provides data on marijuana use across individuals ages 12 and older and the latest data indicate that past month marijuana use is highest for young adults ages 18-25 years old (18.7% in 2012 versus 19.0% in 2011) followed by 26-29 year olds (11.9% in 2012 and 12.3% in 2011) [
Trends in marijuana use are important to monitor given the current shift in the marijuana policy landscape with the liberalizing of marijuana policies [
In the US states where it is legal, medical marijuana can be used to treat various conditions including cachexia, cancer, glaucoma, human immunodeficiency virus infection/acquired immune deficiency syndrome, muscle spasms, seizures, severe nausea, severe pain, and sleep disorders [
Nevertheless, content about marijuana use is likely to have a presence on social media given its recent increased use among youth and both youths’ and adults’ more relaxed views toward marijuana use. In the present study, we assess the content of tweets and demographics of consumers who are following a popular Twitter handle (approximately 1,000,000 followers) that streams daily tweets about marijuana-related content.
The Twitter data in the current study is public. The Washington University Institutional Review Board reviewed our study protocol and our research was deemed exempt from human subjects review.
We searched Twitter for popular accounts related to “marijuana” or “weed” and chose the account with the most followers: “Weed Tweets” (@stillblazingtho) with approximately 1 million followers. The next most popular marijuana-related accounts had approximately 200,000 to 300,000 followers; thus, the above account had by far the highest number of followers. The profile summary of Weed Tweets, @stillblazingtho, is shown in
Profile summary of Weed Tweets @stillblazingtho.
Tweets from @stillblazingtho were collected historically for eight months (May 1, 2013-December 31, 2013). Analytics platform “SimplyMeasured” was used to access the Twitter “firehose” via Gnip (a social data firm that provides access to the Twitter “firehose” stream of every tweet ever sent) and collect all tweets sent from @stillblazingtho for the time period of interest [
Tweets sent from @stillblazingtho were qualitatively analyzed for sentiment and topics/themes. Tweets that were replies to another Twitter user (305/2590, 11.78% of the total tweets) were removed from the dataset because the original tweets would also need to be reviewed in order to understand the context of replies. This resulted in 2285 tweets for qualitative analysis. Tweets were coded for sentiment: positive sentiment about marijuana, negative sentiment about marijuana, neutral/unknown. Topics or themes included in tweets were additionally coded, such as whether the tweet was a joke/humorous, implied that marijuana use is not harmful or dangerous (or less harmful than other substances like alcohol), explicitly encouraged legalization, included a motivational message or quote, implied that marijuana use is good for friendship/promotes getting along, implied that you can still be successful or a good person if you use marijuana, and whether it mentioned other risky health behaviors (eg, tobacco, alcohol, other drugs, sex), the relaxing or de-stressing effects of marijuana use, frequent, regular/routine, or heavy use, blunts, marijuana edibles, or paraphernalia (eg, bongs, vaporizers), and the health benefits of marijuana or medical marijuana use. The sentiment of each tweet was coded and the topic/theme of the tweet was subsequently coded when applicable. Each tweet could be coded for more than one topic/theme if necessary.
We used crowdsourcing to code the tweets with the services of “CrowdFlower” [
Because tweets were coded by multiple coders, the numeric values for sentiment coding were first averaged and then collapsed into negative (values 1 to 2.4), neutral/unknown (values 2.5 to 3.4), and positive (3.5 to 5.0). For the yes/no items, the response from the most “trusted” coder (based on coding accuracy compared to gold standard questions) was chosen; when “trust” scores among the coders were close, the most popular response was chosen. Based on our own coding of 108 test questions compared to final codes from CrowdFlower contributors, overall level of agreement was high. Percent agreement was 91% for sentiment, and ranged from 76% to 100% for topic codes (76% was for the joke/humorous code, which would be expected to have lower agreement due to the subjective nature of the code).
Hashtags (symbol #) are used before a relevant keyword or phrase in a tweet to categorize the tweet so that people can find them more easily in their Twitter search. We also extracted tweets that included hashtags and two members of the research team coded the hashtags as being related to marijuana or not related to marijuana.
We used “Demographics Pro for Twitter” [
Inferred demographics data on current followers of @stillblazingtho on December 9, 2013 at 2:30pm EST were obtained from Demographics Pro [
Characteristics of @stillblazingtho followers were descriptively compared to the median average of the characteristics distributions for Twitter users. Finally, we also report on the popularity of the @stillblazingtho Twitter account within demographic groups based on rankings by Demographics Pro. To examine the popularity of the Twitter handle of interest within demographic groups, Demographics Pro ranks a subset (approximately 250,000 handles with 1000 or more followers) of the 10,000,000 Twitter handles they have analyzed by number of followers within specific demographic groups.
A total of 2590 tweets (2285 regular tweets and 305 replies) were sent from @stillblazingtho from May 1, 2013 to December 31, 2013 (average of 11 tweets per day). The Klout score for @stillblazingtho was 77.8. Regarding engagement, there were a total of 1,964,908 retweets of @stillblazingtho tweets and 135,797 replies to @stillblazingtho during the 8-month time period. Total potential impressions, or total number of times a tweet from @stillblazingtho or a tweet mentioning @stillblazingtho appeared in someone’s Twitter feed, was 2,898,866,761 during the 8-month period.
Qualitative analysis was performed on the 2285 regular tweets sent from @stillblazingtho (305 replies representing 11.78% of total tweets were excluded). Of these tweets that excluded replies, 1875 (82.06%) were positive about marijuana, 403 (17.64%) were either neutral in sentiment or were not specifically about marijuana, and 7 (0.31%) appeared negative about marijuana. Percentages for sentiment of tweets included in the qualitative analysis (excluding replies) and also among total tweets (including replies) are presented in
The distribution of specific topics for the positive marijuana tweets along with example tweets are presented in
Of the 403 neutral tweets, 70 (17.4%) were inspirational or motivational quotes/messages and 58 (14.4%) were jokes/humorous; for example, “If you are always worried about what others think of you, you will never be happy” or “Sitting there wondering why someone hasn’t texted you back, and realizing you never finished sending the message”. Examples of the seven negative tweets include, “If you smoke weed to be cool, you’re a fucking loser” or “I know too many people who have died from drug overdoses. When the fuck are people going to learn #RIP”.
Of the total 2590 tweets sent from @stillblazingtho, 135 (5.21%) contained the use of a hashtag. Only 26 (19.26%) of these hashtags were marijuana specific (eg, #weed, #staystoned, and #stayhigh), while tweets including general hashtags that were non-marijuana related were 109 (80.74%) (eg, #ThingsIWillTeachMyChild, #firstdayofsummer, and #TheSecretToLifeIs).
Topics and themes present in positive marijuana Tweets.
Characteristics of @stillblazingtho followers, other than Twitter activity (eg, tweets per day, number of followers, number of accounts followed), were inferred by Demographics Pro. Of the 959,143 followers of @stillblazingtho, 759,407 (79.17%) were in the United States, 60,211 (6.28%) in the United Kingdom, 41,716 (4.35%) in Canada, and <1% in each of South Africa (n=5460; 0.88%), Netherlands (n=7785; 0.81%), and Mexico (n=6885; 0.72%). Within the United States, @stillblazingtho was in the top 20% of all Twitter accounts. The Twitter followers were active: 34.01% (326,242/959,143) had >5 tweets/day and 36.71% (352,148/959,143) had 1-5 tweets/day. Approximately 82.19% (788,310/959,143) followed a total of 101-1000 of Twitter accounts, and 68.34% (655,489/959,143) of users had a high number of their own followers (101-1000). A total of 54.03% (518,184/959,143) of @stillblazingtho followers were female, which is similar to the Twitter median average (52.6%, IQR 40.7-67.6%). Approximately 81.14% (778,240/959,143) of the followers were single, compared to the Twitter median average of only 38.1% (IQR 9.5-75.1%).
Followers of @stillblazingtho were younger than the Twitter median average age distribution (
More followers of @stillblazingtho in the United States were African American (323,107/759,407; 42.55%) or Hispanic (90,732/759,407; 11.95%) than the Twitter median average (African American 22.4%, IQR 5.1-62.5%; Hispanic 5.4%, IQR 3.0-10.8%) (
More @stillblazingtho followers were students (267,855/959,143; 27.93%) and musicians (205,967/959,143; 21.47%) than the Twitter median average (9.1% students, IQR 4.9-15.0%; 8.2% musicians, IQR 3.3-17.7%). Among students and musicians, @stillblazingtho was in the top 10% and top 20%, respectively, of all Twitter accounts. Music (290,228/959,143; 30.26%) and basketball (274,514/959,143; 28.62%) were the most common interests of @stillblazingtho followers, compared to Twitter median averages of 14.0% music (IQR 9.0-22.9%) and 10.1% basketball (IQR 4.6-19.7%). Many followers of @stillblazingtho also followed rappers and recording artists such as Wiz Khalifa (453,477/959,143; 47.28%), Drake (327,645/959,143; 34.16%), Lil Wayne (323,616/959,143; 33.74%), Mac Miller (277,592/959,143; 28.94%), Nicki Minaj (256,961/959,143; 26.79%), Rihanna (248,927/959,143; 25.95%), and Eminem (234,884/959,143; 24.49%). Twitter median averages for the above recording artists ranged from 7.0% (for Mac Miller, IQR 4.9-8.8%) to 12.6% (for Rihanna, IQR 5.6-24.5%).
Characteristics of “Weed Tweets @stillblazingtho” tweets, 5/1/2013-12/31/2013.
Sentiment of tweetsa | Total tweets | Replies | Tweets excluding replies |
|
n=2590 | n=305 | n=2285 |
n (%) | n (%) |
|
n (%) |
Positive | 1875 (72.39) | - | 1875 (82.06) |
Neutral | 403 (15.56) | - | 403 (17.64) |
Negative | 7 (0.27) | - | 7 (0.31) |
aSentiment of tweets was determined only for regular tweets. Direct replies were excluded because the context of the conversation was difficult to determine without additional information.
Age distribution of @stillblazingtho followers and Twitter median average.
Race/ethnicity distribution of @stillblazingtho followers and Twitter median average.
The @stillblazingtho is a popular Twitter handle with approximately 1 million followers. This Twitter handle sends an average of 11 tweets per day, the vast majority of which promote marijuana use. Most tweets generated from @stillblazingtho contain humorous content about marijuana use followed by tweets that suggested that marijuana helps you to feel good, relax, or chill. This Twitter handle encourages favorable attitudes toward marijuana by distributing a high number of tweets normalizing the routine use of marijuana and promoting its relaxation effects. It additionally engages followers about pro-marijuana culture by tweeting about such content as marijuana edibles (eg, recipes for brownies) and paraphernalia commonly used to smoke marijuana, like bongs and vaporizers. Tweets that minimize the harmful effects of marijuana use and associate its use with health benefits and/or stronger peer relationships are also distributed by @stillblazingtho. In addition, tweets that encourage the legalization of marijuana are sent by this Twitter handle, but this is done to a lesser degree. While tweets from @stillblazingtho comprised a number of themes and topics, most tweets were alike in their overarching positive sentiment toward marijuana use.
The majority of the followers of @stillblazingtho who are being exposed to this pro-marijuana content are predicted to be under 20 years of age (approximately 73%) and 19% are under 17 years old. The average age at which marijuana use begins in the United States is currently at 17.9 years old [
Another primary finding of our study is that African American and Hispanic Twitter users disproportionately follow @stillblazingtho versus Caucasians. This finding signals a disparity in exposure to social media promoting marijuana use in that the pro-marijuana tweets delivered by this handle are disproportionately consumed by minority Twitter users. Our findings match concerning differences in marijuana use by race/ethnicity reported in previous studies [
The @stillblazingtho followers receive pro-marijuana use content from this Twitter handle and could be receiving similar marijuana-related content from other handles. For instance, many of the @stillblazingtho followers are alike in that they follow the same celebrity Twitter handles. One or more of these celebrities could also be tweeting favorably about recreational marijuana use. To illustrate this point, we provide a sample tweet from Wiz Khalifa who is a recording artist followed by many of @stillblazingtho followers (47.3%). On February 8, 2014, Wiz Khalifa tweeted, “Those who don’t understand the beauty of weed, purchasing weed, rolling and sharing of weed are outsiders and have no business in our world.” This tweet demonstrates the likelihood for pro-marijuana content to be distributed by multiple Twitter handles to a cluster of followers. A study of all the pro-marijuana content that is being consumed by the followers of @stillblazingtho is beyond the scope of this study; nevertheless, it is important for public health professionals to consider all of the tweets and Twitter handles that promote harmful norms toward substance use and are connecting with young people. Prevention efforts can use this information to connect with Twitter users in a strategic and meaningful way. One such strategy would be for public health professionals to consider partnering with a popular celebrity who is willing to tweet health promoting messages about the harms associated with marijuana use. Likewise, many of the followers of @stillblazingtho are students and/or musicians, and have interests in music and basketball. Perhaps, these data could be used to distinguish persons who are at increased risk for marijuana use and/or to identify appropriate settings where marijuana use prevention messages could be delivered (eg, music concerts).
Some limitations should be considered when interpreting the results. First, demographics of followers are not actual reported demographics but rather inferred based on Twitter behavior/usage. However, Demographics Pro uses sophisticated methodology (reported in the Methods section) to make such inferences and requires confidence of 95% or above to make an estimate of a single demographic characteristic [
Despite these limitations, our results stress the need for continued research and surveillance on the pro-marijuana content that is currently being delivered via Twitter. We found that youth and young adults as well as minority Twitter users are disproportionately more likely to follow @stillblazingtho, which is a popular Twitter handle that distributes a high number of tweets encouraging favorable attitudes toward marijuana use. Our findings provide a snapshot of the pro-marijuana content that is reaching young people. Twitter use has expanded exponentially, especially among youth and young adults; therefore, an improved understanding of the discourse on Twitter that encourages marijuana use can be helpful for tailoring and targeting online and offline prevention messages.
inter-quartile range
Media Practice Model
This publication was made possible by grant numbers UL1 RR024992 and KL2 RR024994 from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. Other support includes an NIH Career Development Award awarded to Dr Cavazos-Rehg (NIDA, K01DA025733) and NIDA, R01 DA032843, an NIH Midcareer Investigator Award awarded to Dr Bierut (K02 DA021237), and R01 DA031288 awarded to Dr Grucza.
Dr Bierut is listed as an inventor on Issued US Patent 8,080,371,“Markers for Addiction” covering the use of certain single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in determining the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of addiction.