Harnessing the Power of Social Media to Understand the Impact of COVID-19 on People Who Use Drugs During Lockdown and Social Distancing.

Objectives: This paper uses a social media platform, Reddit, to identify real-time experiences of people who use drugs during the COVID-19 lock-down.

Methods: Reddit is a popular and growing social media platform, providing a large, publicly available dataset necessary for high performance of machine learning and topic modeling techniques. We used opioid-related "subreddits," communities where Reddit users engage in conversations about drug use, to examine COVID-19-related content of posts and comments from March to May 2020.