Three Years of r/ChatGPT: Societal Impact Evaluations from Social Media Data

CLAIM (Claim-Specific Citation Network audit, sometimes called CSN) is a forensic method for testing whether a scientific or medical claim's authority is supported by evidence or by citation dynamics. It detects citation bias, amplification, citation diversion, citation transmutation, dead-end citation, and back-door invention.

The ASSAY skill runs a structured, CLAIM-compatible extraction and integrity assessment on an article. Output is a verdict (sound, mixed, flagged, problematic, or cascade), a count of claims extracted, the central key claim, and an integrity note describing the structural read.

This scan restricts ASSAY to peer-reviewed publications and preprint servers. Journalism, opinion pieces, and government documents are evaluated under different frameworks (CAIHL for power and agency; editor's note for context).

ASSAY found the central claims partially supported. Some scaffolding holds; other parts of the argument lean on weaker or contested evidence. Read with the integrity note in mind.

Three-year longitudinal social-media analysis of r/ChatGPT shows that patient-adjacent registers (mental health, chronic illness, medication, caregiving) are a persistent and growing share of the corpus, with measurable shifts in topic composition and sentiment that track external events.

Total claims extracted from the article: 7. The key claim is the single most load-bearing assertion the rest of the argument depends on.

r/ChatGPT is the right population to study and the wrong one to generalize from — self-selected, English-language, technologically engaged, age-skewed. Topic-cluster analysis is methodologically standard. The longitudinal claims (growth over three years) are well-supported but the causal claims (whether ChatGPT changed users vs whether changed users discussed ChatGPT) are not separable in this design. Useful as ground-truth on the conversation surface; not useful as effect estimation. Preprint, not peer-reviewed.

Editor's note: Three years is now a window long enough to do real social-impact analysis. The patient-AI register inside r/ChatGPT is the natural-experimental complement to the JAMA Pediatrics survey: the survey asks a sample; this reads the population.

Summary: arXiv: Three-year observational study of r/ChatGPT — the largest social-media corpus of users actually describing what ChatGPT is doing in their lives, including patient-adjacent registers (mental health, chronic illness, medication, caregiving) — with quantitative impact evaluations across topic clusters.

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