Digital drug consumers - The production of consumption practices in online communities of illicit drug users
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Manchester
Department Name: Social Sciences
Abstract
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.
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.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
Judith Aldridge (Primary Supervisor) | |
Peter Enghoff (Student) |
Publications
Enghoff O
(2019)
The value of unsolicited online data in drug policy research.
in The International journal on drug policy
Studentship Projects
Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
EP/N509565/1 | 30/09/2016 | 29/09/2021 | |||
1923449 | Studentship | EP/N509565/1 | 30/09/2017 | 30/11/2020 | Peter Enghoff |
Title | Content analysis of online harm reduction communities |
Description | A framework to identify and quantify harm reduction content in online social platforms hosting discussion on illicit drug use. |
Type Of Material | Data analysis technique |
Year Produced | 2020 |
Provided To Others? | No |
Impact | A paper on this approach is currently being drafted. |
Title | Social network analysis of online communities of practice |
Description | A framework for using social network analysis to measure the presence of a social structure necessary to facilitate a community of practice in a virtual environment (e.g. a discussion forum). |
Type Of Material | Data analysis technique |
Year Produced | 2019 |
Provided To Others? | No |
Impact | I am about to submit a paper detailing this analytical approach. |
Description | "Digital Text Analysis in Social Science" - departmental seminar at University of Southern Denmark |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Seminar at the Department of Market & Management Anthropology, University of Southern Denmark, September 2017. Around 30 participants, ranging from PhD students to associate professors. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
Description | "How to do Topic Modelling using R" - cross-departmental seminar at the Univesirty of Manchester. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | A one-hour seminar on topic modelling and digital text analysis as part of Methods@Manchester's cross-departmental lunchtime seminar series. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | "The value of unsolicited data sourced from the internet to drug policy scholar" - conference presentation at the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy's annual conference 2018 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Conference presentation at major international conference. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |