Detection of illicit online sales of fentanyls via Twitter
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A counterfeit fentanyl crisis is currently underway in the United States. Counterfeit versions of commonly abused prescription drugs laced with fentanyl are being manufactured, distributed, and sold globally, leading to an increase in overdose and death in countries like the United States and Canada. Despite concerns from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency regarding covert and overt sale of fentanyls online, no study has examined the role of the Internet and social media on fentanyl illegal marketing and direct-to-consumer access. In response, this study collected and analyzed five months of Twitter data (from June-November 2015) filtered for the keyword "fentanyl" using Amazon Web Services. We then analyzed 28,711 fentanyl-related tweets using text filtering and a machine learning approach called a Biterm Topic Model (BTM) to detect underlying latent patterns or "topics" present in the corpus of tweets. Using this approach we detected a subset of 771 tweets marketing the sale of fentanyls online and then filtered this down to nine unique tweets containing hyperlinks to external websites. Six hyperlinks were associated with online fentanyl classified ads, 2 with illicit online pharmacies, and 1 could not be classified due to traffic redirection. Importantly, the one illicit online pharmacy detected was still accessible and offered the sale of fentanyls and other controlled substances direct-to-consumers with no prescription required at the time of publication of this study. Overall, we detected a relatively small sample of Tweets promoting illegal online sale of fentanyls. However, the detection of even a few online sellers represents a public health danger and a direct violation of law that demands further study.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it