JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Stopping the epidemic of e-cigarettes use among youth has become the common goal of both regulatory authorities and health departments. JUUL e-cigarette is currently the most popular brand in the market. Young people usually obtain and exchange the information about JUULs with the help of social media platforms. Along with the rising prevalence of JUUL, the messages about underage JUUL buying and selling have appeared on social media platforms such as Reddit, which sharply increases the risk of minors being exposed to JUUL.

Objective:

This paper aims to analyze Reddit messages about JUUL buying and selling among the users of the UnderageJuul subreddit, and to further summarize the characteristics of those messages. The findings and insights can contribute to a better understanding of the patterns of underage JUUL use, and help public health officials provide in-time education and guidance to the minors who have intentions of accessing JUUL.

Methods:

We used a novel cross-subreddit method to analyze the Reddit messages on two subreddits. We firstly collected data from the UnderageJuul subreddit, which was built for underage JUUL use discussion. The dataset included 716 threads, 2,935 comments, and 844 Reddit users (i.e. Redditors) from July 9, 2017 to January 7, 2018. Then we collected our second dataset, 23,840 threads and 162,106 comments, from the JUUL subreddit posted between July 9, 2017 and January 8, 2019. We conducted analyses including (1) the annotation of users with buying/selling intention, (2) the posting patterns discovery and topic comparison, and (3) posting activeness observation of discovered Redditors. Term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and regular expression-enhanced keyword search methods were applied during the content analysis to extract the posting patterns. Within the year after UnderageJuul subreddit was shut down, the public posting records of the discovered users on JUUL subreddit were analyzed, in order to determine whether they were still active and interested in obtaining JUUL.

Results:

We found that: (1) Among the 716 threads on the UnderageJuul subreddit, there were 214 threads related to JUUL sale and 168 threads related to JUUL purchase, which counted for 53.5% (382/714). (2) Among the 844 Redditors of the UnderageJuul subreddit, there were 23.82% (201/844) and 21.10% (178/844) users who wanted to buy or sell JUULs, respectively. There were 34 users with buying/selling intention reported under 21 years old. (3) The most common key phrases used in selling threads were WTS, want to sell, for sale, and selling (154/214, 72.0%). The most common key phrases used in buying threads were look for/get JUUL/pods (58/168, 34.5%) and WTB (53/168, 31.5%). (4) The most important concern that UnderageJuul Redditors had in obtaining JUULs was the price (311/1,306, 23.81%), then the delivery service (68/1,306, 5.21%). (5) The three most popular flavors among the users with buying/selling intention were mango, cucumber and mint. The flavor preferences remained consistent on two subreddits. Three cases that reported adverse symptoms with mango flavor were identified on the JUUL subreddit. (6) There were 24.4% (49/201) users who wanted to buy JUULs and 46.6% (83/178) users who wanted to sell JUULs, including 11 self-reported underage users, also participated in the discussions on the JUUL subreddit. (7) Within the year after the UnderageJuul subreddit was shut down, there were 40 users who continued to post 186 threads on JUUL subreddit, including 10 threads with buying/selling willingness posted shortly after the UnderageJuul subreddit was closed.

Conclusions:

The messages on the UnderageJuul subreddit were attractive to minors, and the buying/selling-related content with certain posting patterns appeared in multiple venues during the same time period. Such content might lead to high risks for minors in health problems like nicotine addiction. Based on these findings, this study provided some insights and suggestions that might contribute to the decision-making processes of regulators and public health officials.