A recent article published in the Journal of Addictive Diseases took an interesting approach to studying how people perceived gambling addiction during the Covid-19 pandemic. They analyzed Tweets in English from Twitter users in the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. They searched for Tweets that used gambling, addiction and other variations of these terms. After removing unrelated Tweets they were left with 144 Tweets. From these Tweets they inferred some of the following themes:
- Betting companies are responsible for perpetuating problematic gambling behaviours.
- Gambling advertisements have negative impacts on people who gamble problematically.
While these are the sentiments that are present online do you think the general public sees gambling companies and the impacts of gambling advertisements in the same way?
I’m interested in hearing what you think.