Automated Detection of Substance Use-Related Social Media Posts Based on Image and Text Analysis

Abstract

Abstract—Nowadays, teens and young adults spend a significant amount of time on social media. According to the national survey of American attitudes on substance abuse, American teens who spend time on social media sites are at increased risk of smoking, drinking and illicit drug use. Reducing teens’ exposure to substance use-related social media posts may help minimize their risk of future substance use and addiction. In this paper, we present a method for automated detection of substance userelated social media posts. With this technology, substance userelated content can be automatically filtered out from social media. To detect substance use related social media posts, we employ the state-of-the-art social media analytics that combines Neural Network-based image and text processing technologies. Our evaluation results demonstrate that image features derived using Convolutional Neural Network and textual features derived using neural document embedding are effective in identifying substance use-related social media posts.