Waterpipe Promotion and Use on Instagram: #Hookah

Allem, Jon Patrick; Chu, Kar-Hai; Cruz, Tess Boley; Unger, Jennifer B.

doi:10.1093/ntr/ntw329

Cited by 50 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The tobacco product or promotion theme constituted 17.69% of images in this study, while a previous study on hookah similarly reported that 18% of images showed promotional materials [ 10 ]. Among all images in our study, 5.49% showed alcohol, which is less than in prior work, where 31% of all hookah-related images showed or referenced alcohol use [ 10 ]. This finding suggests that little cigar and cigarillo use may not co-occur as often as hookah with alcohol consumption.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

“…We also coded marijuana-themed images for product reference, where a code of 1 indicated that a Swisher wrapper was visible in the image (eg, a wrapper from a Swisher package was next to a hollowed-out cigar) and a code of 0 indicated that a Swisher wrapper was not visible anywhere in the image. In line with prior research using Instagram data to study tobacco-related behavior [ 10 ], we determined the presence (coded 1) or absence (coded 0) of alcohol in all images. One investigator coded all posts and another investigator coded a subsample of posts (n=200) to determine reliability.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These data can be used to inform public policy and pubic health [ 8 ], and have been repeatedly used to provide rapid insights into health behaviors [ 9 ]. For example, by using these data sources, researchers have shown how hookah use is cross-promoted with alcohol [ 10 ], documented reasons for electronic cigarette use [ 11 ], and captured reactions to mass media campaigns [ 12 , 13 ]. A study using Twitter data suggested that individuals tend to report smoking specific brands like Swisher when posting about little cigars and cigarillos [ 14 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Images of Little Cigars and Cigarillos on Instagram Identified by the Hashtag #swisher: Thematic Analysis

Allem¹,

Escobedo²,

Chu³

et al. 2017

J Med Internet Res

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BackgroundLittle cigar and cigarillo use is becoming more prevalent in the United States and elsewhere, with implications for public health. As little cigar and cigarillo use grows in popularity, big social media data (eg, Instagram, Google Web Search, Twitter) can be used to capture and document the context in which individuals use, and are marketed, these tobacco products. Big social media data may allow people to organically demonstrate how and why they use little cigars and cigarillos, unprimed by a researcher, without instrument bias and at low costs.ObjectiveThis study characterized Swisher (the most popular brand of cigars in the United States, controlling over 75% of the market share) little cigar- and cigarillo-related posts on Instagram to inform the design of tobacco education campaigns and the development of future tobacco control efforts, and to demonstrate the utility in using big social media data in understanding health behaviors.MethodsWe collected images from Instagram, an image-based social media app allowing users to capture, customize, and post photos on the Internet with over 400 million active users. Inclusion criteria for this study consisted of an Instagram post with the hashtag “#swisher”. We established rules for coding themes of images.ResultsOf 1967 images collected, 486 (24.71%) were marijuana related, 348 (17.69%) were of tobacco products or promotional material, 324 (16.47%) showed individuals smoking, 225 (11.44%) were memes, and 584 (29.69%) were classified as other (eg, selfies, food, sexually explicit images). Of the marijuana-related images, 157/486 (32.3%) contained a Swisher wrapper, indicating that a Swisher product was used in blunt making, which involves hollowing out a cigar and refilling it with marijuana.ConclusionsImages from Instagram may be used to complement and extend the study of health behaviors including tobacco use. Images may be as valuable as, or more valuable than, words from other social media platforms alone. Posts on Instagram showing Swisher products, including blunt making, could add to the normalization of little cigar and cigarillo use and is an area of future research. Tobacco control researchers should design social media campaigns to combat smoking imagery found on popular sites such as Instagram.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Images of Little Cigars and Cigarillos on Instagram Identified by the Hashtag #swisher: Thematic Analysis

Allem¹,

Escobedo²,

Chu³

et al. 2017

J Med Internet Res

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…for exploring emerging health behaviors and sources of informational exposure (Allem, Chu, Cruz, & Unger, 2017;Ben Taleb, Laestadius, Asfar, Primack, & Maziak, 2018). Instagram users are a diverse cross-section of the population, including adolescents ages 13 to 17 years (Greenwood, Perrin, & Duggan, 2016) and parents/caregivers (Duggan, Lenhart, Lampe, & Ellison, 2015).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterizing HPV Vaccine Sentiments and Content on Instagram

et al. 2019

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Background. With its growing popularity, inclusion of image and text, and user-friendly interface, Instagram is uniquely positioned for exploring health behaviors and sources and types of informational exposure related to the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. Aims. To characterize public Instagram posts about the HPV vaccine and quantify the impact of sentiment and context on engagement via likes. Method. Using Netlytic, 3,378 publicly available English-language posts were collected using the search terms “#HPV,” “#HPVVaccine,” and “#Gardasil.” We randomly selected 1,200 posts to content analyze. Our final analytic sample included 360 posts after excluding posts whose links were no longer active ( n = 221) or that were not relevant ( n = 619). Results. A higher proportion of posts were pro-vaccine (55.8%) than anti-vaccine (42.2%). Pro-HPV vaccination posts were liked significantly less than anti-vaccination posts (24 vs. 86 likes; p < .001). More posts contained actionable information/resources (63.9%) than personal narrative elements (36.1%). Less than one in three posts (30.0%) came from health-related sources. Discussion. Pro-vaccine posts were more prevalent on Instagram, and anti-vaccine posts had higher engagement and typically included misleading information about the HPV vaccine. Personal narratives skewed toward anti-vaccine sentiments and most were produced by individual users. Pro-vaccine narratives portrayed individuals who received the vaccine, but provided limited details on vaccine experiences, starkly contrasting with the depth of details in anti-vaccine personal narrative posts. Conclusion. On Instagram, individuals and organizations have an opportunity to promote HPV vaccination by continuing to provide informational resources in addition to creating more narrative-style posts.

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“…Here we apply a simple MLP which only has one hidden layer [38]. In this analysis, we used the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function defined by [40]:…”

Section: Machine Learning Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Bots for Online Public Health Interventions

Deb

Majmundar

Seo

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)

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According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States hundreds of thousands initiate smoking each year, and millions live with smoking-related diseases. Many tobacco users discuss their habits and preferences on social media. This work conceptualizes a framework for targeted health interventions to inform tobacco users about the consequences of tobacco use. We designed a Twitter bot named Notobot (short for No-Tobacco Bot) that leverages machine learning to identify users posting pro-tobacco tweets and select individualized interventions to address their interest in tobacco use. We searched the Twitter feed for tobacco-related keywords and phrases, and trained a convolutional neural network using over 4,000 tweets dichotomously manually labeled as either protobacco or not pro-tobacco. This model achieves a 90% recall rate on the training set and 74% on test data. Users posting protobacco tweets are matched with former smokers with similar interests who posted anti-tobacco tweets. Algorithmic matching, based on the power of peer influence, allows for the systematic delivery of personalized interventions based on real anti-tobacco tweets from former smokers. Experimental evaluation suggests that our system would perform well if deployed. This research offers opportunities for public health researchers to increase health awareness at scale. Future work entails deploying the fully operational Notobot system in a controlled experiment within a public health campaign.

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Waterpipe Promotion and Use on Instagram: #Hookah

Cited by 50 publications

References 21 publications

Images of Little Cigars and Cigarillos on Instagram Identified by the Hashtag #swisher: Thematic Analysis

Images of Little Cigars and Cigarillos on Instagram Identified by the Hashtag #swisher: Thematic Analysis

Characterizing HPV Vaccine Sentiments and Content on Instagram

Social Bots for Online Public Health Interventions

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