Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: May 24, 2020
Date Accepted: Nov 9, 2020
Healthy disagreement as a driver for public dialogue : Content analysis of public response to a social media tobacco prevention campaign
ABSTRACT
Background:
Previous research suggests that social media-based public health campaigns are often targeted by counter-campaigns.
Objective:
Using reactance theory as the theoretical framework, this research characterizes the nature of public response to tobacco prevention messages disseminated via a social media-based campaign. We also examine whether disagreement with the prevention messages is associated with a negative comment tone and toxic nature of the contribution to the overall discussion.
Methods:
User comments to tobacco prevention messages were extracted from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Two coders categorized comments in terms of: Tone, agreement with message, nature of contribution, mentions of government agency and regulation, promotional or spam comments, and format of comment. Chi-square analyses tested associations between the tone of the public response and the nature of contributions to the discussions.
Results:
Of the 1,242 comments received (Twitter: n=1004; Facebook: n=176: Instagram n=62), many comments used a negative tone (42.75%) and disagreed with the health messages (39.77%), while the majority made healthy contributions to the discussions (84.38%). Only 0.56% of messages mentioned government agencies, and only 0.48% of the comments were anti-regulation. Comments employing a positive tone (84.13%) or making healthy contributions (69.11%) were more likely to agree with the campaign messages (p=0.01). Comments employing a negative tone (71.25%) or making toxic contributions (36.26%) generally disagreed with the messages (p=0.01).
Conclusions:
The majority of user comments to a tobacco prevention campaign made healthy contributions. Our findings encourage the use of social media to promote dialogue about controversial health topics such as smoking. However, toxicity was characteristic of comments that disagreed with the health messages. Managing negative and toxic comments on social media is a crucial issue for social media-based tobacco prevention campaigns to consider.
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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.