In recent years, the use of social media has increased at an unprecedented rate. For example, the popular social media platform Reddit (http://www.reddit.com) had 83 billion page views from over 88,000 active sub-communities (subreddits) in 2015. Members of Reddit made over 73 million individual posts and over 725 million associated comments in the same year [1]. We use Reddit to track opium related discussions, because Reddit allows for throwaway and unidentifiable accounts that are suitable for stigmatized discussions that may not be appropriate for identifiable accounts. Reddit members exchange conversation via a forum like platform, and members who have achieved a certain status within the community are able to create new topically focused group called subreddits.
Objective
We aim to develop an automated method to track opium related discussions that are made in the social media platform called Reddit. As a first step towards this goal, we use a keyword-based approach to track how often Reddit members discuss opium related issues.