Playing the Blame Game: The Media, the Opioid Crisis, and Social Media Communities

The opioid crisis in the United States (U.S.) has spurred widespread public discourse over the last two decades, especially in the news media. The increased usage of Facebook as a medium to share and discuss news has helped to shape the public perception of opioid usage. We examine a substantial, national sample of 513,533 unique posts from 94 of the largest English language newspapers in the U.S. We examine the differences in opioid misuse (1,411) posts and non-opioid drug (3,626) posts, along with the comments made on these posts (48,680). Using supervised learning methods, we classify posts and comments based on categories relevant to understanding perceptions and attitudes regarding the opioid epidemic (e.g., family/friend, blame, illness). We then create a model to help better understand the factors that lead to posts in each category. We make several discoveries, including that the percentage of vote share for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election in a paper's home county, and a higher percentage of black and Hispanic residents was associated with fewer blame related opioid posts. We suggest that given the historical stigma attached to minority groups in previous drug epidemics, there may be a reluctance on the part of those groups to cast blame in the opiate epidemic.