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What anti-vaping messages do people share on social media?
This story, written by Ethan Chupp, was originally published at sph.unc.edu.
Despite their marketing as a healthier alternative to cigarettes, e-cigarette use, or vaping, carries significant health risks. Vaping among youths is often initiated through social influence and curiosity. Every day, vaping is portrayed positively through marketing from influencers, receiving millions of views. To counter this, researchers from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health are developing strategies to discourage vaping.
“Our goals are to counter peer and marketing influences to reduce glamorization of vaping, communicate harms and discourage vaping,” said lead author Allison Lazard, Ph.D., professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Contributors to this research from the Gillings School were Rhyan Vereen, Ph.D., MPH, former postdoctoral trainee, and Nabarun Dasgupta, Ph.D., MPH, a Gillings Innovation Fellow and doctoral alum in epidemiology.
Lazard’s earlier research showed that seeing anti‑vaping content on social media can reduce vaping knowledge and beliefs. The study identified messages that participants said discouraged them from vaping. But to counter pro-vaping content, finding messages that teens and young adults choose to share is key. The latest study, now published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, examined which anti-vaping posts are most likely to be shared. To do this, Lazard’s team drew on clikbrite, a simulated social media platform created by co-author Dominic DiFranzo, Ph.D., of Lehigh University. Clikbrite allows researchers to record user interactions that would be impossible on traditional social media.
“Experiments conducted on social media are often difficult due to proprietary algorithms and display constraints, privacy violations and a lack of reproducibility across research teams,” Lazard said. “We frame clikbrite to participants as a beta platform. They go in knowing that they won’t know anyone on the platform. It’s a test of the content in a controlled environment that also protects participants’ privacy.”
The researchers added visuals to the anti-vaping messages that could easily be shared on social media. They showed participants three different types of messages. The first type emphasized the health harms of vaping. The second featured health harms and a social impact, such as emphasizing a student might be unable to play sports. The third was neutral statements about vapes, such as “Leaving a vape in a hot car may damage it.”
The most likely posts to be shared are about the health harms of vaping.
“Young adults want the facts and they want them plainly stated. That’s what discourages them from vaping and makes them want to tell others about it,” added Lazard. “We also found that if we talk about novel health harms, that can be more discouraging than things the participants already know.”
Although the study measured participants’ intention to share the messages, it did not measure whether their vape usage decreased in the long term. Future research could examine whether sharing anti-vaping messages reduces social influences for vaping. But in the campaign to reduce vaping, there is compelling evidence that the best thing you can do is share health harms that people might not know.
