JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The Omnibus Budget Bill, known as H.R. 2471, passed through Congress on March 10th, 2022, and was eventually signed by President Biden on March 15th, 2022. This bill amended the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act granting FDA regulatory authority over synthetic nicotine.

Objective:

This study aims to examine the public perceptions of the Omnibus Bill that regulates synthetic nicotine products as tobacco products on Twitter.

Methods:

Through Twitter streaming API (Application Programming Interface), we collected tweets related to the synthetic nicotine and the Omnibus Bill between March 8th, 2022, and April 13th, 2022. The inductive method was used for the content analysis of related tweets. By hand-coding 200 randomly selected tweets by two human coders, the codebook was developed for relevance, major topics, and attitude to the bill, which was applied to the rest of the tweets.

Results:

We identified 964 tweets related to the Omnibus Bill on synthetic nicotine. Our longitudinal trend analysis showed that there was a spike in the number of tweets related to the bill during the first four days after the bill was introduced. A majority of the tweets had a negative sentiment toward the bill (52%, 496/964), while a much less percentage of tweets had a positive sentiment toward the bill (16.4%, 157/964). The most popular topic for opposing the bill was users believing that this bill would lead users back to smoking (28.4%, 141/496). The most popular topic for supporting the bill was this bill would take a dangerous tobacco product targeted at teens off the market (59.87%, 94/157).

Conclusions:

There is a more negative sentiment towards the Omnibus Budget Bill on Twitter, largely due to users believing it would lead users back to smoking. This study provides insight into public perceptions and discussions of this bill on Twitter.