Electronic cigarette and quit smoking quest in Twitter: Preliminary study

Abstract

Aims: Use of electronic cigarettes has dramatically increased in last few years. Although the sales of e-cigarettes were banned since 2013, they can still be easily purchased via online sales, and its' advertisement is rife in the social media. We aimed to take a closer look at the contents of the shared information about e-cigarettes on one such media outlet, Twitter. Methods: We tracked twitter for 102 days (from 25.09.2017-26.01.2018) searching for Turkish key words “electronic cigarettes”, “ ecigarettes”, or “e-cigarettes” using R software. This data was classified using unsupervised topic modelling. Resulting dataset was reduced and classified and 15 topics were established. Results: First 10 terms under each of the 15 topics were prioritized for this presentation. Words such as tobacco, dependence, cancerogen, substance, containing, waterpipe, liquid, liver indicated a general “harms of e-cigarettes” idea. Terms such as liquid, atomiser, IQS, health, aroma, variety, price, e-cigarette device pointed to “product advertising and marketing”. Text under topic 8 was more concerned with legalization issues, indicated by text such as “Iqos”(6) “omnibus bill”, “legal”. Text under topics 9 and 10 and the videos under topic 11 were mostly related to constraints in use and safety issues. Conclusion: Results of the study showed that chatter in the Turkish social media is mostly focused on those smokers contemplating quitting due to health risks involved in smoking. This points to an important opportunity for tobacco control community in Turkey to further inform the public on healthy ways to quit smoking and work to make cessation services more accessable Footnotes Cite this article as: European Respiratory Journal 2018 52: Suppl. 62, PA4544. This is an ERS International Congress abstract. No full-text version is available. Further material to accompany this abstract may be available at www.ers-education.org (ERS member access only).