4: Public Discourses About the Opioid Crisis on Social Media

When it comes to media discourse surrounding the Canadian opioid crisis, much attention has been paid to news media reporting on opioid harms, interventions, and government initiatives or lack thereof. As social media has been found to be a key source of public health discussions, research has increasingly turned to platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter to investigate public discourses relating to opioid usage, harms, and the ongoing crisis. However, there is a distinct lack of empirical studies that examine public discourses on the opioid crisis in general as the majority of previous studies focus on social media surveillance of either specific opioid drugs or opioid drug use. In addition, there remains a clear lack of social media research that focuses on Canadian-specific opioid awareness in comparison to studies that focus on the news media. Hence, this chapter fills a major gap in the literature since it empirically examines mainly Twitter as well as Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit using multimodal analysis that involves both textual and visual assessments. Many social media users blamed persons with opioid addiction and drug gangs as well as politicians and/the government for being behind the opioid crisis. As for their solutions, they mostly discussed the need for effective government action in addition to establishing safe consumption sites and increasing awareness.