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Promotion of Disposable Electronic Cigarette Flavors and Topics on Twitter

Disposable electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) became popular among youth after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) implemented an enforcement policy to restrict the sale of cartridge-based flavored e-cigarettes starting from February 2020 in the United States (US). We aimed to examine the flavo...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Sun, Li, Tao, Chunliang, Xie, Zidian, Li, Dongmei
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7764575/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33321714
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17249221
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author Sun, Li
Tao, Chunliang
Xie, Zidian
Li, Dongmei
author_facet Sun, Li
Tao, Chunliang
Xie, Zidian
Li, Dongmei
author_sort Sun, Li
collection PubMed
description Disposable electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) became popular among youth after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) implemented an enforcement policy to restrict the sale of cartridge-based flavored e-cigarettes starting from February 2020 in the United States (US). We aimed to examine the flavors and topics related to disposable e-cigarettes on Twitter. The Twitter dataset, which includes 1489 tweets, was collected by the Tweepy streamapplication programming interface (API) using a keyword query from March to September 2020. The disposable e-cigarette flavors were curated from both online stores and collected tweets. Topics related to disposable e-cigarettes on Twitter were manually coded. Distributions of topics were compared between tweets from the US and tweets from non-US countries. The temporal analysis results showed a slight increase in the number of discussions over the study period. Strawberry, mango, watermelon, and mint were the most popular flavors of disposable e-cigarettes mentioned on Twitter. Almost all the tweets (97.11%) were commercial tweets, which were dominated by topics related to the product and flavor promotions. The US tweets focused more on product and flavor promotions and less on price promotions compared to non-US tweets. Our results suggest that companies exploited the limitations of legislation to promote flavors on Twitter, which could undermine public health and young people’s finances if they get hooked on addictive products.
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spelling pubmed-77645752020-12-27 Promotion of Disposable Electronic Cigarette Flavors and Topics on Twitter Sun, Li Tao, Chunliang Xie, Zidian Li, Dongmei Int J Environ Res Public Health Article Disposable electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) became popular among youth after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) implemented an enforcement policy to restrict the sale of cartridge-based flavored e-cigarettes starting from February 2020 in the United States (US). We aimed to examine the flavors and topics related to disposable e-cigarettes on Twitter. The Twitter dataset, which includes 1489 tweets, was collected by the Tweepy streamapplication programming interface (API) using a keyword query from March to September 2020. The disposable e-cigarette flavors were curated from both online stores and collected tweets. Topics related to disposable e-cigarettes on Twitter were manually coded. Distributions of topics were compared between tweets from the US and tweets from non-US countries. The temporal analysis results showed a slight increase in the number of discussions over the study period. Strawberry, mango, watermelon, and mint were the most popular flavors of disposable e-cigarettes mentioned on Twitter. Almost all the tweets (97.11%) were commercial tweets, which were dominated by topics related to the product and flavor promotions. The US tweets focused more on product and flavor promotions and less on price promotions compared to non-US tweets. Our results suggest that companies exploited the limitations of legislation to promote flavors on Twitter, which could undermine public health and young people’s finances if they get hooked on addictive products. MDPI 2020-12-10 2020-12 /pmc/articles/PMC7764575/ /pubmed/33321714 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17249221 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Sun, Li
Tao, Chunliang
Xie, Zidian
Li, Dongmei
Promotion of Disposable Electronic Cigarette Flavors and Topics on Twitter
title Promotion of Disposable Electronic Cigarette Flavors and Topics on Twitter
title_full Promotion of Disposable Electronic Cigarette Flavors and Topics on Twitter
title_fullStr Promotion of Disposable Electronic Cigarette Flavors and Topics on Twitter
title_full_unstemmed Promotion of Disposable Electronic Cigarette Flavors and Topics on Twitter
title_short Promotion of Disposable Electronic Cigarette Flavors and Topics on Twitter
title_sort promotion of disposable electronic cigarette flavors and topics on twitter
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7764575/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33321714
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17249221
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