Education, Personal Experiences, and Advocacy: Examining Drug-Addiction Videos on YouTube

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Drug addiction has become one of the most severe worldwide social problems. Recent research has examined utilizing social media to support addiction recovery and the problematic use of social media for selling drugs and glamorizing drug use. Prior studies have focused on textual and networking-based social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, but there is limited understanding of how video-based platforms like YouTube allow creators to share drug addiction-related videos and discourse about addiction problems. This work performs a content analysis of 387 drug-addiction-related videos collected from YouTube. The grounded-theory approach based on the health-emergency framework identifies how drug-addiction videos discourse the addiction-related risk, blame, urgency, praise, and solution. Video viewership and comments are also compared between the emerged video themes. Results suggest YouTubers educate others about drug addiction, disclose personal experiences, and advocate for addiction prevention and recovery. Based on our findings, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of using video-sharing to prevent and educate drug addiction.