Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Nov 11, 2020
Date Accepted: Nov 19, 2021
Perception of FDA Electronic Cigarette Flavor Enforcement Policy on Twitter: Observational Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
On January 2, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released the electronic cigarette flavor enforcement policy to prohibit the sale of all flavored cartridge-based e-cigarettes, except for menthol and tobacco flavors.
Objective:
This research aimed to examine the public attitudes towards this FDA flavor enforcement policy and its impact on the public perception of electronic cigarettes on Twitter.
Methods:
A total number of 2,341,660 e-cigarette related tweets and 190,490 FDA flavor enforcement policy related tweets in USA were collected from Twitter before (between June 13 and August 22, 2019) and after (between January 2 to March 30, 2020) the announcement of the FDA flavor enforcement policy. Sentiment analysis was conducted to detect the changes in the public attitudes towards the policy and e-cigarettes on Twitter. Topic modeling was used for finding frequently discussed topics about e-cigarettes.
Results:
Compared to before the announcement of the FDA flavor enforcement policy, the proportion of negative sentiment tweets about e-cigarettes significantly increased after the announcement of the FDA flavor enforcement policy. In contrast, the overall sentiment towards FDA flavor enforcement policy became less negative. The FDA flavor enforcement policy was the most popular topic associated with e-cigarettes after the announcement of FDA flavor enforcement policy. Twitter users who discussed about e-cigarettes started to talk about other alternative ways for getting e-cigarettes after the FDA flavor enforcement policy.
Conclusions:
Twitter users’ attitudes towards e-cigarettes became more negative after the announcement of the FDA flavor enforcement policy.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.