Title: Detection and Characterization of Illegal Marketing and Promotion of Prescription Drugs on Twitter,
Abstract: Illicit online pharmacies allow the purchase of prescription drugs online
without a prescription. Such pharmacies leverage social media platforms such as
Twit- ter as a promotion and marketing tool with the intent of reaching out to
a larger, potentially younger demographics of the population. Given the serious
negative health effects that arise from abusing such drugs, it is important to
identify the relevant content on social media and exterminate their presence as
quickly as pos- sible. In response, we collected all the tweets that contained
the names of certain preselected controlled substances over a period of 5
months. We found that an unsupervised topic modeling based methodology is able
to identify tweets that promote and market controlled substances with high
precision. We also study the meta-data characteristics of such tweets and the
users who post them and find that they have several distinguishing
characteristics that sets them apart. We were able to train supervised methods
and achieve high performance in detecting such content and the users who post
them.