Potential impact of a COVID-19 and smoking paper on Twitter users’ attitudes toward smoking: Observational Study (Preprint)
BACKGROUND A cross-sectional study conducted by French researchers showed that the rate of current daily smoking was significantly lower in COVID-19 patients than in the French general population. OBJECTIVE We aim to examine the dissemination of this French study among Twitter users and whether a shift in their attitudes towards smoking occurred after its publication on April 21st, 2020. METHODS Twitter posts were crawled between April 14th and May 4th, 2020 by the Tweepy stream API, using a COVID-19 related keyword query. After filtering, the final 1,929 tweets were classified into three groups: 1) tweets not related to French study before it was published; 2) tweets not related to French study after it was published; 3) tweets related to French study after it was published. The tweets’ attitudes towards smoking were compared among the above three groups using multinomial logistic regression models in statistical analysis software R. RESULTS The temporal analysis showed a peak in the number of tweets discussing the results from the French study right after its publication. Multinomial logistic regression models on sentiment scores showed the proportion of negative attitudes toward smoking in tweets related to French study after it was published (17.07%) was significantly lower than tweets not related to the French study either before (34.92%, P < 0.001) or after the French study was published (34.34%, P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS The public’s attitude toward smoking shifted in a positive direction after the French study found a lower incidence of COVID-19 cases in daily smokers.