JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Instagram is a popular social networking platform for users to upload pictures to share their experiences. Instagram has been widely used by vape companies and stores to promote electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), as well as by public health entities to communicate with the public about the risk of e-cigarettes use (vaping).

Objective:

We aim to characterize current vaping-related content on Instagram through descriptive analyses.

Methods:

From Instagram, 42,951 posts were collected using vaping-related hashtags in November 2019. The posts were grouped as ‘pro-vaping’, ‘vaping-warning’, ‘neutral-to-vaping’ and ‘not-related-to-vaping’ based on their attitudes to vaping. From these Instagram posts and corresponding 18,786 unique Instagram user accounts, 200 pro-vaping and 200 vaping-warning posts, as well as 189 pro-vaping and 155 vaping-warning user accounts, were randomly selected for further hand-coding. Furthermore, the follower count and the media (post) count of the Instagram user accounts, as well as the like count and hashtags of the posts, were compared between pro-vaping and vaping-warning groups.

Results:

There were more posts in the pro-vaping group (41,412 posts) than the vaping-warning group (1,539 posts). The majority of pro-vaping images were product display (n=163, 81.5%), and the most popular image type in vaping-warning was educational (n=95, 47.5%). The highest proportion of pro-vaping user account type was the vaping store (n=110, 58.1%), and the store account type had the most average posts (10.33 post/account). The top three vaping-warning user account types were personal (n=79, 51%), vaping-warning community (n=37, 23.9%), and community (n=35, 22.6%), in which the vaping-warning community has the most average posts (3.68 posts/account). The pro-vaping user accounts had more follower count (median=850) and media count (median=232) than vaping-warning user accounts (median=191, 92 respectively). The pro-vaping posts had more like count (median=22) and the number of hashtags (mean=20.39) than vaping-warning posts (median=12, mean=7.16 respectively).

Conclusions:

Instagram had been dominated by the pro-vaping content, and the pro-vaping posts and user accounts seem to have more user engagement than vaping-warning. These results highlight the importance of regulating e-cigarette posts on social media, and the urgency of identifying effective communication with the public about the health effects of e-cigarettes to ameliorate the epidemic of vaping in youth.