Understanding cannabis information on social media: Examining tweets from verified, regular, and suspended users

The general public, especially young adults and adolescents, can easily be affected by social media; thus, it is imperative to understand how different types of user groups can influence the public. First, we collected Twitter data regarding cannabis and divided the users into three groups based on their Twitter account status: verified, regular and suspended. Second, we employed qualitative (i.e., thematic analysis) and quantitative (i.e., Latent Dirichlet Allocation) methods to examine the content of the three groups. Third, we computationally calculated sentiment of tweets to examine how the messages were conveyed for the user groups. We observed that those user groups shared similar topical interests of cannabis on Twitter, but with slightly different focus and motivation through a mixed-methods approach. The findings from this study could be used to design public health education programs targeting young adults and adolescents. In addition, we suggest that researchers employ both qualitative and quantitative methods to fully discern the subtle differences in health-related social media discussions.