Exploring #MentholBan on TikTok: A Thematic and Semantic Network Analysis

In April 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced its intention to ban the sale of menthol cigarettes and cigars. Decades of research support the premise that a menthol ban will reduce initiation and disparities in tobacco-related disease among menthol smokers. The tobacco industry opposed such a policy and worked for decades to shape public opposition. Social media discourse can inform our understanding of public opinion about the proposed ban and guide communication strategies and policy implementation.

This research employed a mixed-methods design to explore TikTok posts discussing the announced menthol ban. Using a TikTok web scraper to extract all content in the #mentholban hashtag (n = 171), we coded for 11 themes, characterized content with descriptive statistics, and created a semantic network of co-occurring hashtags.

We found primarily negative attitudes towards the U.S. ban announcement and a large volume of menthol "hacks" to circumvent the bans. Our semantic network analysis revealed strong co-occurrences between #mentholban and popularity-seeking hashtags. The metadata associated with each TikTok demonstrated that most posters in #mentholban are not "influencers" in the sense of having many followers, aside from a few niche organizations with multiple posts. We found that perceived political and racial motivations shaped posters' assessments of the menthol ban. Furthermore, we uncovered how individuals and organizational actors shaped menthol ban content on TikTok.

Our study indicates targeted marketing from alternative menthol product companies and advocacy organizations. The latter of these organizations is more likely to saturate the TikTok landscape with multiple posts and strategic hashtags.

This study pursued an exploration of tobacco policy discussion on TikTok, specifically related to the FDA-proposed menthol ban. TikTok is a newer platform and our study provides early evidence of policy discussion emerging there, including the types of accounts creating the content and their valence toward the policy.