Scientists have revealed they could use social media to monitor posts from drug addicts.

Social media platforms are the latest scientific research method to discover more about physical addictions.

Recent research conducted by Dartmouth, Stanford University and IBM research explores the effectiveness of sharing personal problems with addictions online.

Sunny Jung Kim, lead author and e-health communication scholar, believes that the high traffic of social media provided them with important information about peoples activities online.

“Our review and typology suggests that social media big data and platforms can be a tremendous resource for monitoring and intervening on behalf of people with drug addiction and abuse problems,” he said.

“Harnessing social media platforms and data can provide insight into important novel discoveries of collective public health risk behavior, a better understanding of people.

“I started this project because there were few studies about why people use social networking sites to share unsolicited, highly personal information about their drug use, nor about the psychological effects or consequences of this type of user-generated communication,” said Mr Kim who claims the research concluded that monitoring social media can be a tremendous resource.