scholarly journals User Perceptions of Different Electronic Cigarette Flavors on Social Media: Observational Study (Preprint)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyi Lu ◽  
Long Chen ◽  
Jianbo Yuan ◽  
Joyce Luo ◽  
Jiebo Luo ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND The number of electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) users has been increasing rapidly in recent years, especially among youth and young adults. More e-cigarette products have become available, including e-liquids with various brands and flavors. Various e-liquid flavors have been frequently discussed by e-cigarette users on social media. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to examine the longitudinal prevalence of mentions of electronic cigarette liquid (e-liquid) flavors and user perceptions on social media. METHODS We applied a data-driven approach to analyze the trends and macro-level user sentiments of different e-cigarette flavors on social media. With data collected from web-based stores, e-liquid flavors were classified into categories in a flavor hierarchy based on their ingredients. The e-cigarette–related posts were collected from social media platforms, including Reddit and Twitter, using e-cigarette–related keywords. The temporal trend of mentions of e-liquid flavor categories was compiled using Reddit data from January 2013 to April 2019. Twitter data were analyzed using a sentiment analysis from May to August 2019 to explore the opinions of e-cigarette users toward each flavor category. RESULTS More than 1000 e-liquid flavors were classified into 7 major flavor categories. The fruit and sweets categories were the 2 most frequently discussed e-liquid flavors on Reddit, contributing to approximately 58% and 15%, respectively, of all flavor-related posts. We showed that mentions of the fruit flavor category had a steady overall upward trend compared with other flavor categories that did not show much change over time. Results from the sentiment analysis demonstrated that most e-liquid flavor categories had significant positive sentiments, except for the beverage and tobacco categories. CONCLUSIONS The most updated information about the popular e-liquid flavors mentioned on social media was investigated, which showed that the prevalence of mentions of e-liquid flavors and user perceptions on social media were different. Fruit was the most frequently discussed flavor category on social media. Our study provides valuable information for future regulation of flavored e-cigarettes.

10.2196/17280 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. e17280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyi Lu ◽  
Long Chen ◽  
Jianbo Yuan ◽  
Joyce Luo ◽  
Jiebo Luo ◽  
...  

Background The number of electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) users has been increasing rapidly in recent years, especially among youth and young adults. More e-cigarette products have become available, including e-liquids with various brands and flavors. Various e-liquid flavors have been frequently discussed by e-cigarette users on social media. Objective This study aimed to examine the longitudinal prevalence of mentions of electronic cigarette liquid (e-liquid) flavors and user perceptions on social media. Methods We applied a data-driven approach to analyze the trends and macro-level user sentiments of different e-cigarette flavors on social media. With data collected from web-based stores, e-liquid flavors were classified into categories in a flavor hierarchy based on their ingredients. The e-cigarette–related posts were collected from social media platforms, including Reddit and Twitter, using e-cigarette–related keywords. The temporal trend of mentions of e-liquid flavor categories was compiled using Reddit data from January 2013 to April 2019. Twitter data were analyzed using a sentiment analysis from May to August 2019 to explore the opinions of e-cigarette users toward each flavor category. Results More than 1000 e-liquid flavors were classified into 7 major flavor categories. The fruit and sweets categories were the 2 most frequently discussed e-liquid flavors on Reddit, contributing to approximately 58% and 15%, respectively, of all flavor-related posts. We showed that mentions of the fruit flavor category had a steady overall upward trend compared with other flavor categories that did not show much change over time. Results from the sentiment analysis demonstrated that most e-liquid flavor categories had significant positive sentiments, except for the beverage and tobacco categories. Conclusions The most updated information about the popular e-liquid flavors mentioned on social media was investigated, which showed that the prevalence of mentions of e-liquid flavors and user perceptions on social media were different. Fruit was the most frequently discussed flavor category on social media. Our study provides valuable information for future regulation of flavored e-cigarettes.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yankun Gao ◽  
Zidian Xie ◽  
Dongmei Li

BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown that electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) users might be more vulnerable to COVID-19 infection and could develop more severe symptoms if they contract the disease owing to their impaired immune responses to viral infections. Social media platforms such as Twitter have been widely used by individuals worldwide to express their responses to the current COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE In this study, we aimed to examine the longitudinal changes in the attitudes of Twitter users who used e-cigarettes toward the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as compare differences in attitudes between e-cigarette users and nonusers based on Twitter data. METHODS The study dataset containing COVID-19–related Twitter posts (tweets) posted between March 5 and April 3, 2020, was collected using a Twitter streaming application programming interface with COVID-19–related keywords. Twitter users were classified into two groups: Ecig group, including users who did not have commercial accounts but posted e-cigarette–related tweets between May 2019 and August 2019, and non-Ecig group, including users who did not post any e-cigarette–related tweets. Sentiment analysis was performed to compare sentiment scores towards the COVID-19 pandemic between both groups and determine whether the sentiment expressed was positive, negative, or neutral. Topic modeling was performed to compare the main topics discussed between the groups. RESULTS The US COVID-19 dataset consisted of 4,500,248 COVID-19–related tweets collected from 187,399 unique Twitter users in the Ecig group and 11,479,773 COVID-19–related tweets collected from 2,511,659 unique Twitter users in the non-Ecig group. Sentiment analysis showed that Ecig group users had more negative sentiment scores than non-Ecig group users. Results from topic modeling indicated that Ecig group users had more concerns about deaths due to COVID-19, whereas non-Ecig group users cared more about the government’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. CONCLUSIONS Our findings show that Twitter users who tweeted about e-cigarettes had more concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings can inform public health practitioners to use social media platforms such as Twitter for timely monitoring of public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and educating and encouraging current e-cigarette users to quit vaping to minimize the risks associated with COVID-19.


10.2196/24859 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. e24859
Author(s):  
Yankun Gao ◽  
Zidian Xie ◽  
Dongmei Li

Background Previous studies have shown that electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) users might be more vulnerable to COVID-19 infection and could develop more severe symptoms if they contract the disease owing to their impaired immune responses to viral infections. Social media platforms such as Twitter have been widely used by individuals worldwide to express their responses to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Objective In this study, we aimed to examine the longitudinal changes in the attitudes of Twitter users who used e-cigarettes toward the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as compare differences in attitudes between e-cigarette users and nonusers based on Twitter data. Methods The study dataset containing COVID-19–related Twitter posts (tweets) posted between March 5 and April 3, 2020, was collected using a Twitter streaming application programming interface with COVID-19–related keywords. Twitter users were classified into two groups: Ecig group, including users who did not have commercial accounts but posted e-cigarette–related tweets between May 2019 and August 2019, and non-Ecig group, including users who did not post any e-cigarette–related tweets. Sentiment analysis was performed to compare sentiment scores towards the COVID-19 pandemic between both groups and determine whether the sentiment expressed was positive, negative, or neutral. Topic modeling was performed to compare the main topics discussed between the groups. Results The US COVID-19 dataset consisted of 4,500,248 COVID-19–related tweets collected from 187,399 unique Twitter users in the Ecig group and 11,479,773 COVID-19–related tweets collected from 2,511,659 unique Twitter users in the non-Ecig group. Sentiment analysis showed that Ecig group users had more negative sentiment scores than non-Ecig group users. Results from topic modeling indicated that Ecig group users had more concerns about deaths due to COVID-19, whereas non-Ecig group users cared more about the government’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions Our findings show that Twitter users who tweeted about e-cigarettes had more concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings can inform public health practitioners to use social media platforms such as Twitter for timely monitoring of public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and educating and encouraging current e-cigarette users to quit vaping to minimize the risks associated with COVID-19.


Sentiment can be described in the form of any type of approach, thought or verdict which results because of the occurrence of certain emotions. This approach is also known as opinion extraction. In this approach, emotions of different peoples with respect to meticulous rudiments are investigated. For the attainment of opinion related data, social media platforms are the best origins. Twitter may be recognized as a social media platform which is socially accessible to numerous followers. When these followers post some message on twitter, then this is recognized as tweet. The sentiment of twitter data can be analyzed with the feature extraction and classification approach. The hybrid classification is designed in this work which is the combination of KNN and random forest. The KNN classifier extract features of the dataset and random forest will classify data. The approach of hybrid classification is applied in this research work for the sentiment analysis. The performance of the proposed model is tested in terms of accuracy and execution time.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yankun Gao ◽  
Zidian Xie ◽  
Dongmei Li

BACKGROUND Previous studies indicated electronic cigarette users might be more vulnerable to COVID-19 infections and could develop more severe symptoms once contracted COVID-19 due to their impaired immune responses to virus infections. Social media has been widely used to express users’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE We aimed to examine the responses of electronic cigarette Twitter users to the COVID-19 pandemic using Twitter data. METHODS The COVID-19 dataset contained COVID-19-related Twitter posts (tweets) between March 5th, 2020 and April 3rd, 2020. Ecig group included Twitter users who didn’t have commercial accounts but ever retweeted e-cigarette promotion posts between May 2019 and August 2019. Twitter users who didn’t post or retweet any e-cigarette-related tweets were defined as Non-Ecig group. Sentiment analysis was conducted to compare sentiment scores towards the COVID-19 pandemic between both groups. Topic modeling was used to compare the main topics discussed between the two groups. RESULTS The US COVID-19 dataset consisted of 1,112,558 COVID-19-related tweets from 15,657 unique Twitter users in the Ecig group and 9,789,584 COVID-19-related tweets from 2,128,942 unique Twitter users in the Non-Ecig group. Sentiment analysis showed that the Ecig group have more negative sentiment scores than the Non-Ecig group. Results from topic modeling indicated the Ecig group had more concern about COVID-19 related death, while the Non-Ecig group cared more about the government’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. CONCLUSIONS Electronic cigarette Twitter users has more concern towards the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitter is a useful tool to timely monitor public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
C S Pavan Kumar ◽  
L D Dhinesh Babu

Sentiment analysis is widely used to retrieve the hidden sentiments in medical discussions over Online Social Networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. People often tend to convey their feelings concerning their medical problems over social media platforms. Practitioners and health care workers have started to observe these discussions to assess the impact of health-related issues among the people. This helps in providing better care to improve the quality of life. Dementia is a serious disease in western countries like the United States of America and the United Kingdom, and the respective governments are providing facilities to the affected people. There is much chatter over social media platforms concerning the patients’ care, healthy measures to be followed to avoid disease, check early indications. These chatters have to be carefully monitored to help the officials take necessary precautions for the betterment of the affected. A novel Feature engineering architecture that involves feature-split for sentiment analysis of medical chatter over online social networks with the pipeline is proposed that can be used on any Machine Learning model. The proposed model used the fuzzy membership function in refining the outputs. The machine learning model has obtained sentiment score is subjected to fuzzification and defuzzification by using the trapezoid membership function and center of sums method, respectively. Three datasets are considered for comparison of the proposed and the regular model. The proposed approach delivered better results than the normal approach and is proved to be an effective approach for sentiment analysis of medical discussions over online social networks.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-33
Author(s):  
Stevent Efendi ◽  
Alva Erwin ◽  
Kho I Eng

Social media has been a widespread phenomenon in the recent years. People shared a lot of thought in social media, and these data posted on the internet could be used for study and researches. As one of the fastest growing social network, Twitter is a particularly popular social media to be studied because it allows researchers to access their data. This research will look the correlation between Twitter chatter of a brand and the sales of brands in Indonesia. Factors such as sentiment and tweet rate are expected to be able to predict the popularity of a brand. Being one of the biggest industries in Indonesia, automotive industry is an interesting subject to study. A wide range of people buys vehicles, and even gather as communities based on their car or motorcycle brand preference. The Twitter results of sentiment analysis and tweet rate will be compared with real world sales results published by GAIKINDO and AISI.


The rise of social media platforms like Twitter and the increasing adoption by people in order to stay connected provide a large source of data to perform analysis based on the various trends, events and even various personalities. Such analysis also provides insight into a person’s likes and inclinations in real time independent of the data size. Several techniques have been created to retrieve such data however the most efficient technique is clustering. This paper provides an overview of the algorithms of the various clustering methods as well as looking at their efficiency in determining trending information. The clustered data may be further classified by topics for real time analysis on a large dynamic data set. In this paper, data classification is performed and analyzed for flaws followed by another classification on the same data set.


Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew

Malicious political socialbots used to sway public opinion regarding the U.S. government and its functions have been identified as part of a larger information warfare effort by the Russian government. This work asks what is knowable from a web-based sleuthing approach regarding the following four factors: 1) the ability to identify malicious political socialbot accounts based on their ego neighborhoods at 1, 1.5, and 2 degrees; 2) the ability to identify malicious political socialbot accounts based on the claimed and linked geographical locations of their accounts, their ego neighborhoods, and their #hashtag networks; 3) the ability to identify malicious political socialbot accounts based on their strategic messaging (content, sentiment, and language structures) on respective social media platforms; and 4) the ability to identify and describe “maliciousness” in malicious political socialbot accounts based on observable behaviors on that account on three social media platform types: (a) microblogging, (b) social networking, and (c) crowd-sourced encyclopedia content sharing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-618
Author(s):  
Linnea I. Laestadius ◽  
Kendall Penndorf ◽  
Melissa Seidl ◽  
Pallav Pokhrel ◽  
Ryan Patrick ◽  
...  

Social media platforms are home to large volumes of ambiguous hashtag-based claims about the health, modified-risk, and cessation benefits of electronic cigarette products (e.g., #Vapingsavedmylife). The objective of this study was to qualitatively explore how young adults interpret these hashtags on the popular platform Instagram. Specifically, we sought to identify if they view these hashtags as making health-related claims, and if they find these claims to be credible and valid. We conducted 12 focus groups in 2018 with non–tobacco users, smokers, dual users, and vapers between the ages of 18 and 24 ( n = 69). Using real Instagram posts to guide discussion, participants reflected on the meaning of potentially claims-making hashtags. Participants interpreted the majority of the hashtags as making health-related claims. However, many participants felt that the claims were too exaggerated to be entirely valid. Some participants, including dual users and vapers, argued that smoking and vaping were largely equivalent. Smokers were particularly skeptical of claims. Findings suggest that the U. S. Food and Drug Administration should consider hashtag-based claims in their regulatory efforts. However, further research is needed on how to pragmatically address claims taking the form of hashtags given legal and practical constraints.


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