Electronic Cigarette-Related Contents on Instagram: Observational Study and Exploratory Analysis

Area of Science:

• Social Media Analysis
• Public Health Communication
• Digital Marketing

Background:

• Instagram is a key platform for both e-cigarette promotion and public health messaging.
• Vaping companies and public health entities utilize Instagram for their respective campaigns.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze and characterize vaping-related content on Instagram.
• To compare engagement metrics between pro-vaping and vaping-warning content.

Main Methods:

• Collected 42,951 Instagram posts using vaping-related hashtags in November 2019.
• Categorized posts into pro-vaping, vaping warning, neutral, or unrelated.
• Hand-coded 200 posts and 200 user accounts from pro-vaping and vaping-warning groups for detailed analysis.

Main Results:

• Pro-vaping posts (41,412) vastly outnumbered vaping-warning posts (1539).
• Pro-vaping content featured product displays, while vaping-warning content was primarily educational.
• Pro-vaping accounts (e.g., stores) had more followers, media, likes, and hashtags than vaping-warning accounts.

Conclusions:

• Instagram is heavily influenced by pro-vaping content with higher user engagement.
• Urgent need to develop effective public health strategies for communicating e-cigarette risks on social media.
• Regulation of e-cigarette content on social media platforms is crucial to address youth vaping.