Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Aug 1, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 5, 2019 - Sep 20, 2019
Date Accepted: Jan 13, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Defining Characteristics of Gun Advertising through Social Media: Opportunities for Intervention
ABSTRACT
Background:
While several important studies explore firearm advertising, there are currently no assessments of gun advertising through social media.
Objective:
To quantify the characteristics of gun advertising on social media, and to compare the reach of manufacturer posts with those of influencers.
Methods:
We collected Twitter and YouTube posts made by industry, and coded the posts for the presence of a variety of themes first described in work on print advertising. We calculated differences in characteristics by social media platform and compared recent posts to most popular posts.
Results:
Firearms manufacturers use social media to attract audiences to websites that sell firearms: 14.1(±2.9) percent of Twitter posts, 53.6(±6.2) percent of manufacturers videos, and 89.5(±5.1) percent of influencer videos link to websites that facilitate sales. Advertisements included women in efforts to sell handguns and pistols for the purpose of protection: 33.3(±8.4) percent of videos with women included protection themes compared with 12.5(±4.9) percent of videos without women that included protection themes. Top manufacturers representing 85 percent of the domestic firearms market received 98 million channel views, compared with 6.1 billion channel views received by the top twelve YouTube influencers.
Conclusions:
Even though social media companies exclude firearms companies from paid advertising, firearms companies use social media as an advertising platform to connect viewers to websites that sell guns. Manufacturers make use of YouTube and YouTube influencers to reach large audiences to promote sales.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.