Topics and Sentiment Surrounding Vaping on Twitter and Reddit During the 2019 e-Cigarette and Vaping Use-Associated Lung Injury Outbreak: Comparative Study.
Dezhi WuErin KassonAvineet Kumar SinghYang RenNina KaiserMing HuangPatricia A Cavazos-RehgPublished in: Journal of medical Internet research (2022)
Post content and trending topics overlapped on both Twitter and Reddit during the EVALI period in 2019. However, crucial differences in user type and content keywords were also found, including more frequent mentions of health-related keywords on Twitter and more negative health outcomes from vaping mentioned on both Reddit and Twitter. Use of both computational and clinical content analyses is critical to not only identify signals of public health trends among vaping-related social media content but also to provide context for vaping risks and behaviors. By leveraging the strengths of both Twitter and Reddit as publicly available data sources, this research may provide technical and clinical insights to inform automatic detection of social media users who are vaping and may benefit from digital intervention and proactive outreach strategies on these platforms.