JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

On April 28th, 2022, FDA proposed rules that ban all menthol-flavored cigarettes and other flavor cigars to prevent the initiation of tobacco use in youth and reduce tobacco-related disease and death.

Objective:

The objective of this study was to investigate public perceptions of the FDA’s menthol cigarette ban proposal on Twitter.

Methods:

Through Twitter streaming Application Programming Interface (API), tobacco-related tweets were collected between April 28th, 2022, and May 27th, 2022, using a set of keywords, such as smoking, cigarette, and nicotine. Furthermore, 1941 menthol-cigarette-ban-related tweets were extracted. Based on randomly selected 300 example tweets, the codebook for the attitudes towards the ban proposal and related topics was developed by two human coders, which was used to label the rest of the tweets.

Results:

Among tweets related to the menthol cigarette ban proposal, 536 (27.61%) showed a positive attitude, 443 (22.82%) had a negative attitude, and 962 (49.56%) had a neutral attitude toward the proposal. Social justice (39%) and health issue (22%) were two major topics in tweets with a positive attitude. For tweets with a negative attitude, alternative tobacco/nicotine products (29%) and racial discrimination (16%) were two of the most popular topics.

Conclusions:

In general, the public had a more positive attitude toward the FDA’s menthol cigarette policy. Our study assisted FDA to obtain public perceptions of the menthol ban proposal from different channels - social media.