Identifying Sentiment of Hookah-Related Posts on Twitter.

Social media data provide researchers the ability to understand public sentiment and attitudes by listening to what people are saying in their own words. Tobacco control programmers in charge of risk communication may consider targeting individuals posting positive messages about hookah on Twitter or designing messages that amplify the negative sentiments. Posts on Twitter communicating positive sentiment toward hookah could add to the normalization of hookah use and is an area of future research. Findings from this study demonstrated the importance of debiasing data when attempting to understand attitudes from Twitter data.