Discussions of Flavored ENDS Sales Restrictions: Themes Related to Circumventing Policies on Reddit

Silver, Nathan; Kucherlapaty, Padmini; Kostygina, Ganna; Tran, Hy; Miao, Feng; Emery, Sherry; Schillo, Barbara

doi:10.3390/ijerph19137668

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…N-grams connected sequences of n items (words) from a given sample of text or speech (Broder et al, 1997). We examined top unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams and found that the trigrams were the most interpretable for salient content themes, consistent with previous social media tobacco research (Benson et al, 2020; Czaplicki, Kostygina, et al, 2020; Malik et al, 2021; N. Silver et al, 2022).…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 74%

Deciphering Influence on Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Influential Account Detection Metrics in the Context of Tobacco Promotion

Kresovich,

Norris,

Carter

et al. 2024

Social Media + Society

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Influencer marketing spending in the United States was expected to surpass $6 billion in 2023. This marketing tactic poses a public health threat, as research suggests it has been utilized to undercut decades of public health progress—such as gains made against tobacco use among adolescents. Public health and public opinion researchers need practical tools to capture influential accounts on social media. Utilizing X (formerly Twitter) little cigar and cigarillo (LCC) data, we compared seven influential account detection metrics to help clarify our understanding of the functions of existing metrics and the nature of social media discussion of tobacco products. Results indicate that existing influential account detection metrics are non-harmonic and time-sensitive, capturing distinctly different users and categorically different user types. Our results also reveal that these metrics capture distinctly different conversations among influential social media accounts. Our findings suggest that public health and public opinion researchers hoping to conduct analyses of influential social media accounts need to understand each metric’s benefits and limitations and utilize more than one influential account detection metric to increase the likelihood of producing valid and reliable research.

show abstract

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 74%

Deciphering Influence on Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Influential Account Detection Metrics in the Context of Tobacco Promotion

Kresovich,

Norris,

Carter

et al. 2024

Social Media + Society

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We used a search filter previously developed and validated by our team to identify flavoured e-cigarette products (ie, posts referencing flavours of e-cigarettes, other electronic nicotine delivery systems, e-liquids, e-juice, etc). 45 Sample search rules included “flavor OR flavors OR flavored OR flavorant OR flavorants OR flavoring OR flavoring”, etc.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Industry response to strengthened regulations: amount and themes of flavoured electronic cigarette promotion by product vendors and manufacturers on Instagram

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

BackgroundSocial media discussion tends to follow news about proposed or enacted government policies. Thus, digital discourse surveillance may be an effective and unobtrusive way of understanding industry and public response to policies and regulations, including in the domain of tobacco control. Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration restricted sales of flavoured cartridge and disposable vape products. Historically, the tobacco industry used modification of product characteristics, labelling or packaging to work around flavour restrictions. We aimed to characterise strategies used by nicotine product manufacturers and vendors to promote flavoured products on Instagram and to identify policy workaround tactics.MethodsKeyword rules were used to collect flavoured electronic cigarette-related Instagram posts from CrowdTangle, from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2021. Posts were coded for commercial content and promotional strategies using a combination of machine learning methods, keyword algorithms and human coding. Additional exploratory analyses were conducted to identify major discussion themes. Non-English posts were excluded from the analyses.ResultsKeyword filters captured 113 393 relevant posts from 391 unique accounts, with 46 076 posts referencing flavour promotion (40.6%) and 2124 (2%) posts mentioning alternatives to restricted flavoured products or strategies to evade flavour sales restrictions. Promotional messages featured non-characterising flavour references, ‘off-brand’ product substitutes, promotion of new flavoured product technologies, innovation, do-it-yourself appeals, global promotion, international delivery and encouraged flavoured product stockpiling. In addition, promotion of refillable devices, e-juice, tank systems and ‘box mod’ vaporizers was present.ConclusionSocial media surveillance can enhance our understanding of public health needs and policy compliance, as well as inform strategies to prevent policy evasion. Examining evolving industry tactics to promote flavoured products in response to regulatory changes can help authorities and practitioners assess policy effectiveness and inform future design and implementation approaches.

show abstract

Tobacco control policies discussed on social media: a scoping review

Dobbs,

Kong,

Lovett

et al. 2024

Tob Control

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ObjectiveTo describe the scope of published literature about tobacco-related policy discussions from social media data and discuss implications for tobacco control policy and future research.Data sourcesPubMed, Medline, CINAHL and Web of Science were searched on 20 November 2023, using search terms for social media, tobacco, and policy. The search was limited from 2005 to 2023.Study selectionAfter removing duplicates, 2 authors reviewed 1118 articles. Those found to be irrelevant based on title (1078) and abstract (18) review were removed.Data extractionData included study descriptions (eg, policy discussed, social media platform and number of posts), study characteristics (eg, methodology, sentiment analysis (propolicy, antipolicy, neutral policy and unclear policy)), and major and additional findings.Data synthesisOf the 22 articles, most examined discussions about USA (n=18) federal regulations (n=17) via human annotation (n=18), using Twitter (X; n=20). Of the 14 papers that discussed sentiment, 4 collected data at different time points; frequency of positive posts typically decreased after policy announcements. Policies discussed in articles included flavour restrictions; USA ban of Puff Bar; Tobacco 21; tobacco taxes; e-cigarette regulation; UK’s standardised packaging; product authorisation; regulating e-cigarettes as a medical product; WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control regulatory actions; Australia’s import restrictions on vaping products and smoke-free and tobacco-free college campus policies.ConclusionsSocial media data can be leveraged to examine timely discourse regarding tobacco control policies. Identified methods of circumventing proposed tobacco control laws and enforcement challenges should be considered by regulatory agencies to close policy loopholes and inform implementation practices.

show abstract

Discussions of Flavored ENDS Sales Restrictions: Themes Related to Circumventing Policies on Reddit

Cited by 5 publications

References 31 publications

Deciphering Influence on Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Influential Account Detection Metrics in the Context of Tobacco Promotion

Deciphering Influence on Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Influential Account Detection Metrics in the Context of Tobacco Promotion

Industry response to strengthened regulations: amount and themes of flavoured electronic cigarette promotion by product vendors and manufacturers on Instagram

Tobacco control policies discussed on social media: a scoping review

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About