Before diving into our detailed study on controversial tweets, we conducted preliminary descriptive analyses. These analyses helped us examine general metrics of our tweets to get an overview of our dataset and identify potential avenues for deeper studies. The word cloud of the 100 most frequent hashtags (displayed on the homepage) highlights the most discussed topics in our dataset. Notable hashtags include Covid19, vaccine, Coronavirus, Vaccines, and pandemic, indicating significant concern and intense discussion around the COVID-19 pandemic and associated vaccines. Despite our dataset covering various topics, from non-drug interventions (NDIs) to the COVID-19 pandemic, we found that COVID-19-related discussions were predominant compared to NDIs. Consequently, we strategically decided to refocus our analysis on NDIs. This decision optimized our resources by reducing data processing load and allowing us to concentrate on a specific area for more in-depth analysis.
The interactive dashboard thus focuses solely on results related to non-drug interventions (NDIs). It presents:
We observed that the hashtags #cancer and #cannabis are the most used and liked. Additionally, these two hashtags often appear together, suggesting an association between cancer and cannabis. This implies that cannabis is widely discussed as a potential non-drug intervention in cancer treatment.