Refracting Blame in the Fentanyl Era: The Narrative Battleground on Facebook and Instagram.

Background

More than 80,000 Americans died of drug overdoses between August 2022 and August 2023, a crisis most recently driven by synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

Objectives

To investigate how blame for the opioid crisis is constructed within the most engaging content on Facebook and Instagram by identifying the dominant thematic frames and patterns of blame attribution. Using CrowdTangle, we collected US opioid-related posts from July 2022 to June 2023 and analyzed the top 0.5% most-engaged posts (1,267 total). Three trained coders used a detailed codebook to categorize content, focusing on thematic frames, blame attribution, and source partisanship.

Results

Results revealed a discourse dominated by a criminal justice perspective (45.5% of posts), with blame most frequently attributed to illicit suppliers (52.2%) while institutional actors like pharmaceutical companies were largely ignored (<1%). Partisan sources were highly prevalent, and there were significant differences in how blame was assigned between right-leaning and left-leaning accounts. Notably, references to harm reduction and evidence-based treatments were minimal.

Conclusions

The most engaging social media content on the opioid crisis does not reflect broad public sentiment but rather the amplified narratives of specific interest groups, particularly law enforcement and political actors. These findings demonstrate how popular online discourse can foreground criminality and partisan conflict over public health solutions, with critical implications for health communication.