Sharing Antivaping Social Media Messages.

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Social Media Research
• Health Communication

Background:

• Visual-based social media platforms host billions of views for vaping content, often driven by influencers.
• Effective strategies are needed to counteract positive vaping portrayals and promote awareness of health risks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the impact of social media messages about vaping health harms on young adults' sharing intentions and perceptions.
• To compare the effectiveness of health harm messages versus health harm messages with a social impact component.

Main Methods:

• A between-persons experiment involved 712 US young adults (18-25 years) randomized to view social media messages.
• Participants interacted with simulated social media feeds displaying messages on vaping health harms, health harms with social impact, or a control.
• Data collected included sharing intentions, perceived message effectiveness, relevance, vaping knowledge, and beliefs.

Main Results:

• Health harm messages significantly increased sharing intentions, perceived effectiveness, relevance, and vaping knowledge compared to control messages (p < .001).
• Messages combining health harms with social impact showed similar effects to health harm messages alone.
• Young adults intended to share anti-vaping messages primarily with friends via direct messages or social media stories.

Conclusions:

• Social media communication of vaping health harms is a viable strategy to engage young adults.
• Encouraging the sharing of novel health harm information among peers can amplify anti-vaping messages.