Characteristics of and User Engagement With Antivaping Posts on Instagram: Observational Study

Abstract

Background Although government agencies acknowledge that messages about the adverse health effects of e-cigarette use should be promoted on social media, effectively delivering those health messages is challenging. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms among US youth and young adults, and it has been used to educate the public about the potential harm of vaping through antivaping posts. Objective We aim to analyze the characteristics of and user engagement with antivaping posts on Instagram to inform future message development and information delivery. Methods A total of 11,322 Instagram posts were collected from November 18, 2019, to January 2, 2020, by using antivaping hashtags including #novape, #novaping, #stopvaping, #dontvape, #antivaping, #quitvaping, #antivape, #stopjuuling, #dontvapeonthepizza, and #escapethevape. Among those posts, 1025 posts were randomly selected and 500 antivaping posts were further identified by hand coding. The image type, image content, and account type of antivaping posts were hand coded, the text information in the caption was explored by topic modeling, and the user engagement of each category was compared. Results Analyses found that antivaping images of the educational/warning type were the most common (253/500; 50.6%). The average likes of the educational/warning type (15 likes/post) were significantly lower than the catchphrase image type (these emphasized a slogan such as “athletesdontvape” in the image; 32.5 likes/post; P<.001). The majority of the antivaping posts contained the image content element text (n=332, 66.4%), followed by the image content element people/person (n=110, 22%). The images containing people/person elements (32.8 likes/post) had more likes than the images containing other elements (13.8-21.1 likes/post). The captions of the antivaping Instagram posts covered topics including “lung health,” “teen vaping,” “stop vaping,” and “vaping death cases.” Among the 500 antivaping Instagram posts, while most posts were from the antivaping community (n=177, 35.4%) and personal account types (n=182, 36.4%), the antivaping community account type had the highest average number of posts (1.69 posts/account). However, there was no difference in the number of likes among different account types. Conclusions Multiple features of antivaping Instagram posts may be related to user engagement and perception. This study identified the critical elements associated with high user engagement, which could be used to design antivaping posts to deliver health-related information more efficiently.

Public Perceptions of Flavored Waterpipe Smoking on Twitter

“…Although social media has been used to assess longitudinal trends in the perception of other tobacco products such as e-cigarettes [ 32 , 40 , 41 ], few studies had investigated the longitudinal trends and public attitudes toward waterpipe flavors using social media data [ 34 ]. We showed that fruit, sweets, and beverages were the most mentioned waterpipe flavor groups on Twitter, which was similar to what was observed in a recent study on waterpipe-related discussions on Reddit and another study on flavored e-cigarettes on Twitter [ 32 , 34 ]. More importantly, we used aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) rather than document-based sentiment analysis, which allowed for a more accurate contextualization of flavor mentions.…”

“…As ABSA can target opinions towards specific entities in a document, an additional benefit of our approach was the ability to extract user sentiments towards multiple flavors in one document, as opposed to just one flavor. In contrast, traditional sentiment analysis methods used in other studies could only be applied to documents containing only one flavor in order to avoid ambiguity, since these methods are unable to handle situations where multiple flavors are mentioned in one tweet [ 32 ].…”

“…First, we extracted 1,394,016 waterpipe-related tweets from 9 March 2021 to 19 May 2022. Furthermore, we assigned each tweet to either a promotional or non-promotional category based on whether the tweet contained promotional words, such as “available now”, “grand opening”, “for sale”, etc., [ 32 ]. Altogether, we identified 1,158,884 non-promotional tweets and 235,132 promotional tweets (see the data-processing flowchart presented in Figure S1 ).…”

“…To better contextualize the flavors mentioned in the tweets, based on the previous well-established flavor wheel for e-cigarettes, we grouped each waterpipe flavor hierarchically into three levels [ 35 ]. Each specific flavor was categorized into a minor flavor category, each of which was grouped into an intermediate flavor category, each of which broadly fit into one major flavor category [ 32 , 34 ]. For example, a scraped flavor of “mango” would be grouped into the minor flavor category of “mango”, which is encompassed by the “tropical” intermediate flavor category, which is contained in the major flavor category of “fruit”.…”

“…Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms, with roughly 237 million active users worldwide as of July 2022 [ 31 ]. Twitter has been used in previous studies to understand user opinions of e-cigarettes and oral nicotine pouches [ 32 , 33 ]. Few studies have used Twitter to examine public opinion on waterpipe products, especially different waterpipe flavors [ 34 ].…”