Sharing Antivaping Social Media Messages

Positive vaping portrayals and marketing from influencers receive billions of views on visual-based social media. Strategies are needed to counter these appeals and encourage sharing about health harms.

We recruited 712 US young adults (ages 18-25 years) through Cloud Research for our between-persons experiment. Participants were randomized to view four social media messages in one of the following three conditions: health harms, health harms with a social impact, or control. Participants first viewed and interacted with their condition messages on a simulated social media feed. Participants were shown messages again and reported sharing intentions, perceived message effectiveness, and relevance of each message. Last, participants reported vaping knowledge and beliefs.

Health harm messages lead to greater sharing intentions, perceived message effectiveness (discouraged vaping), relevance, knowledge, and beliefs compare to control messages, p = .03-p < .001. Health harms paired with social impact messages discouraged vaping more than control messages but otherwise were rated similarly to the health harm messages. Participants would share antivaping messages mostly with friends (73%-76%) and through private (direct message, 55%) or ephemeral channels (social media stories, 46%-49%). Overall, Black and Hispanic young adults had higher sharing intentions, greater message relevance, and lower vaping knowledge compared to non-Hispanic White participants. Overall, Black young adults were more discouraged from vaping by the messages.

Communicating novel information about vaping health harms on social media is a promising strategy to reach young adults where they are online and encourage sharing among friends.