The HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s fundamentally changed sexual practices of men who have sex with men (MSM) in the U.S., including increased usage of sexual health-related (SHR) language in personal advertisements. Analyzing online personal ads from Craigslist, we found a substantial increase in SHR language, from ~23% in 1988 to over 53% today, echoing continuing concern about rising HIV rates. We argue that SHR language in Craigslist ads can be used as a sensor to provide insight into HIV epidemiology as well as discourse among particular communities. We show a positive significant relationship between prevalence rate of HIV in an ad's location and use of SHR language in that location. Analysis highlights the opportunity for SHR information found in Craigslist personal ads to serve as a data source for HIV prevention research. More broadly, we argue for mining large-scale user-generated content to inform HCI design of health and other systems, and explore use of such data to examine temporal changes in language to facilitate improved user-interface design.
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Haimson et al. (2014) studied this question.
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