Prevalence of Marijuana-Related Traffic on Twitter, 2012–2013: A Content Analysis

Abstract This study assessed marijuana-related content posted by adolescents on Twitter and examined content variation before and after the 2012 U.S. election legalizing recreational use in two states. For two 3-week periods occurring 6 months before and after the election, a 1% random sample was obtained of all tweets matching a set of marijuana-related queries. Original content was separated from reposted content (retweets), and foreign language tweets and those not related to marijuana were excluded. Using a structured codebook, tweet content was categorized (e.g., mention of personal marijuana use, parents' views, perceived effects.) Self-reported age was extracted from tweet metadata when available. Chi-square tests were used to assess differences in content by whether the user self-identified as an adolescent and to compare content pre- versus post-election. The full sample consisted of 71,901 tweets. After excluding nonrelevant tweets and separating original tweets from retweets, the analytic sampl...