Different Anti-Vaping Campaigns Attracting the Same Opponent Community

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Social Media Analysis
• Behavioral Science

Background:

• E-cigarettes (vape) are the most prevalent tobacco product among US youth.
• Nicotine in vapes poses addiction risks and harms adolescent brain development.
• Adults may benefit from vaping to quit smoking, creating conflicting public health messages.

Purpose of the Study:

• To address the challenge of analyzing diverse audience feedback on anti-vaping campaigns.
• To propose a method for partitioning audiences based on attitudes and affiliations.
• To identify the communities behind oppositional messages to public health campaigns.

Main Methods:

• Introduction of the "community detection on anti-vaping campaign audience" problem.
• Design and implementation of the "Sorento" algorithm.
• Sorento calculates user intimacy scores using social connections, repost relations, and content similarities.

Main Results:

• The Sorento algorithm effectively detects communities within anti-vaping campaign audiences.
• Oppositional messages to anti-vaping campaigns originate from a consistent community of pro-vaping advocates.
• This community's influence is evident across different campaigns, locations, and times.

Conclusions:

• Audience segmentation is crucial for understanding responses to public health campaigns.
• A unified pro-vaping community actively opposes anti-vaping initiatives online.
• Sorento provides a valuable tool for analyzing and understanding online discourse surrounding public health issues.