Survival of Illegal Fentanyl Sales in the Twittersphere and Tumblr Sphere: A Cross-Sectional Forensics Approach

초록

Social media offer valuable knowledge about opioid narcotics’ risks but are also commonly used to sell them. To determine how drug dealers avoid social media surveillance, the cross-sectional study used fentanyl-related data from Twittersphere and Tumblrsphere.The three-stagee process with data collection, preprocessing, and forensic tracking of fentanyl sales and promotion was performed. Twitter data were consistent between January and June 2021, while Tumblr data were more up-to-date. From January to June 2021, 12189 tweets and, from January 2020 to July 2021, 1240, Tumblr posts related to fentanyl were gathered. A higher proportion of Tumblr data (192, 15.56%) was classified as fentanyl sales and promotion, compared with Twitter data (1, 0.01%). Twitter has been successful in limiting the sale of opioids. However, more attention should be paid to non-English languages. Researchers, governments, and social media companies must collaborate to positively maintain social networking platforms to prevent the illicit sale of drugs through them.

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