Talking about tobacco on Twitter is associated with tobacco product use

Abstract

Tobacco-related content appears on social media in the form of advertising and messages by individuals. However, little is known about associations between posting social media messages and tobacco product use among adolescents and young adults. Self-reports of tobacco product use were obtained from the Children's Health Study of young adults in Southern California. Among the 1486 respondents in the most recent wave of the cohort (2016–2017), 284 provided tobacco product use data and their Twitter user names to access publicly available Twitter account data (mean age = 20.1 yrs. (SD = 0.6), 54% female, 49% Hispanic). We obtained the tweets that those respondents posted on Twitter, searched the tweets for 14 nicotine- and tobacco-related keywords, and coded these statements as positive or negative/neutral. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to determine whether respondents who posted positive tobacco-related tweets were more likely to report tobacco product use, relative to those who did not post any positive tobacco-related tweets. Respondents who posted any positive messages about tobacco had significantly higher odds of reporting past month use of cigarettes (OR = 3.15, 95% CI = 1.36, 7.30) and any tobacco product (OR = 2.41, 95% CI = 1.16, 5.01), relative to respondents who did not post about tobacco. This is the first study to establish an empirical link between adolescents' and young adults' tobacco-related Twitter activity and their tobacco product use. Health communications about the risks of tobacco use could target adolescents who post positive messages about tobacco products on Twitter.