Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had increased population-level anxiety and had elicited panic buying behaviour across the world. The over-hoarding of toilet paper has received a lot of negative public attention. In this work, we used Twitter data to qualitatively analyse tweets related to panic buying of toilet paper during the crisis. Methods: A total of 255,171 tweets were collected. Of these 4081 met our inclusion criteria and 100 tweets were randomly selected to develop a coding scheme in the initial phase. Random samples of tweets in folds of 100 were then qualitatively analysed in the focused coding phase until saturation was met at 500 tweets analysed. Results: Five key themes emerged: (1) humour or sarcasm, (2) marketing or profiteering, (3) opinion and emotions, (4) personal experience, and (5) support or information. About half of the tweets carried negative sentiments, expressing anger or frustration towards the deficiency of toilet paper and the frantic situation of toilet paper hoarding, which were among the most influential tweets. Discussion: Panic buying of toilet paper was seen during the 2020 pandemic period with a mass amount of related content spread across social media. The spontaneous contagion of fear and panic through social media could fuel psychological reactions in midst of crises. The high level of negative social media posts regarding the toilet paper crisis acts as an emotional trigger of public anxiety and panic. Conclusions: Social media data can provide rapid infodemiology of public mental health. In a pandemic or crisis situation, real-time data could be monitored and content-analysed for authorities to promptly address public concerns.

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Background and AimsThere has been an increase in the potency of cannabis during the last two decades and adoption of a novel method of administration-vaping. YouTube, a social media platform, has become a popular source to access cannabis-related information. This study aimed to identify cannabis vaping YouTube videos from 2016 to 2020 and examine the themes and metrics. Design Cross-sectional sample of 200 YouTube videos. Setting YouTube, an on-line video sharing platform. Measurements Videos related to cannabis vaping were identified using the search terms:'vaping cannabis', 'vaping weed', 'vaping marijuana' and 'vaping THC' [tetrahydrocannabinol]. Videos were independently coded by two researchers. The number of views, likes, dislikes and comments were also collected. Robust regression was used to analyse the relationship between identified video themes and video metrics. Findings Six themes were identified: 'advertisement', 'product review', 'celebratory ', 'reflective', 'how-to' and 'warning'. The 'how-to' and 'celebratory' videos received the highest number of views and likes. The most popular video was viewed more than 4 000 000 times. Many videos portrayed risky behaviour (e.g. vaping a whole THC cartridge in a single setting). Fifty-two percent of these videos had no age access restrictions. The robust regression model also found that engagement metric was positively associated with 'reflective' videos and negatively associated with 'advertisement' videos. Conclusions A large number of videos on cannabis vaping are available on-line without age-restriction. Videos that portrayed risky behaviour appear to be prevalent.