Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Infodemiology
Date Submitted: Jan 5, 2022
Date Accepted: Apr 18, 2022
COVID-19 and Tweets about Quitting Cigarette Smoking: A Topic Model Analysis of Twitter Posts 2018-2020
ABSTRACT
Background:
The risk of infection and severity of illness by SARS-Cov-2 is elevated for people who smoke cigarettes and may motivate quitting. Organic public conversations on Twitter about quitting smoking could provide insight into quitting motivations or behaviors associated with the pandemic.
Objective:
This study explored key topics of conversation about quitting smoking and examined their trajectory during 2018-2020.
Methods:
Topic model analysis with latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) identified themes in U.S. tweets with the term “quit smoking.” The model was trained on 2018 posts and applied to tweets in 2019 and 2020. Anovas and follow-up pair-wise tests compared daily frequency of tweets within and across years by quarter.
Results:
Mean daily tweets on quitting smoking in 2018, 2019, and 2020 were, respectively, 133 (SD=36.2), 145 (SD=69.4), and 127 (SD=32.6). Six topics were extracted: (i) need to quit, (ii) personal experiences, (iii) electronic cigarettes, (iv) advice/success, (v) quitting as a component of general health behavior change, and (vi) clinics/services. Overall, the pandemic was not associated with changes in posts about quitting; instead, New Year’s resolutions and the 2019 EVALI epidemic were more plausible explanations for observed changes within and across years. Fewer 2nd-quarter posts in 2020 for e-cigarettes may reflect lower pandemic-related quitting interest, but fourth-quarter increases in 2020 for other topics pointed to a late-year upswing.
Conclusions:
Twitter posts suggest that the pandemic did not generate greater interest in quitting but possibly a decrease when the rate of infections was increasing in the second quarter of 2020. Public health authorities may wish to craft messages for specific Twitter audiences (e.g., using hashtags) to motivate quitting during pandemics.
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