Understanding the Dynamics between Vaping and Cannabis Legalization Using Twitter Opinions

Authors

  • Shishir Adhikari University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Akshay Uppal University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Robin Mermelstein University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Tanya Berger-Wolf University of Illinois at Chicago Ohio State University
  • Elena Zheleva University of Illinois at Chicago

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18037

Keywords:

Measuring predictability of real world phenomena based on social media, e.g., spanning politics, finance, and health, Subjectivity in textual data; sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction, linguistic analyses of social media behavior, Text categorization; topic recognition; demographic/gender/age identification

Abstract

Cannabis legalization has been welcomed by many U.S. states but its role in escalation from tobacco e-cigarette use to cannabis vaping is unclear. Meanwhile, cannabis vaping has been associated with new lung diseases and rising adolescent use. To understand the impact of cannabis legalization on escalation, we design an observational study to estimate the causal effect of recreational cannabis legalization on the development of pro-cannabis attitude for e-cigarette users. We collect and analyze Twitter data which contains opinions about cannabis and JUUL, a very popular e-cigarette brand. We use weakly supervised learning for personal tweet filtering and classification for stance detection. We discover that recreational cannabis legalization policy has an effect on increased development of pro-cannabis attitudes for users already in favor of e-cigarettes.

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Published

2021-05-22

How to Cite

Adhikari, S., Uppal, A., Mermelstein, R., Berger-Wolf, T., & Zheleva, E. (2021). Understanding the Dynamics between Vaping and Cannabis Legalization Using Twitter Opinions. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 15(1), 14-25. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18037