Digital drug consumers - The production of consumption practices in online communities of illicit drug users

This research was designed and funded in relation to the following EPSRC research themes and sub themes: Digital economy; trust, identity and security; digital business models; content creation and consumption.

Ever since internet communication technologies became accessible to the general public of developed countries in the 1980's, illicit drug users from this part of the world have appropriated them by creating massive online communication platforms which function as influential digital hubs for the production and dissemination of illicit drug consumption practices.

Research from the previous decade has already established the potential of these platforms to-among other things-increase/decrease supply of and demand for specific substances and increase/decrease physical, mental and social harms associated with specific substances. In the meantime, internet communication technologies have spread to an even larger public, have become even more inter-weaved with normal social activities and have advanced significantly in a technological sense.

The aim of this EPSRC-funded research is to account for these significant developments in two important ways:

- By analysing data from the most recent iterations of online drug consumer culture such as massive sub-forums on mainstream platforms like reddit and forums hosted by encrypted online drug markets (ie 'darknet markets' or 'cryptomarkets')
- By developing a novel digital research methodology that employs analytic methods which were developed within computer science but are now beginning to be applied more widely. This methodology combines online data collection, social network analysis and natural language processing and thus makes it possible to conduct an analysis of the structure and content of online illicit drug platforms on an unprecedented scale (i.e. millions of observations across multiple platforms).

This leads to a highly contemporary analysis of online drug consumer culture which aims to provide an up-to-date picture of how drug buying and selling practices are produced in the digital domain by addressing the following research questions:

-How is demand for specific drugs produced/reduced in online markets and communities?
-Which attitudes and practices of drug buying/selling are being disseminated in online markets and communities? E.g. safe use or experimentation?
-How does the community and market structure and type of interaction facilitated by the platform impact the above?

These questions will be addressed for three types of platforms - encrypted market forums (i.e. 'darknet markets' or 'cryptomarkets')compared to newer massively popular mainstream platforms (e.g. reddit and Facebook) and historically influential specialised discussion forums. A comparative analysis of large data sets from these platforms is made possible by the quantitative digital methodology which is applied and developed as part of this research. This methodology consists in a combination of automated online data collection (crawling and scraping), descriptive statistics, social network analysis/statistics and natural language processing algorithms (topic modelling and word embeddings). Developing such an approach allows for socio-semantic analysis of online communities which is able to account for both the social structure and thematic content (as well as the interplay of these) in online interactions on a scale which has not been seen before within the field of online drug research, while also having applications outside of this field and thus contributing to online social media research in general.