Promotional e-cigarette posts on popular photo-sharing platform Instagram outnumber anti-vaping content 10,000 to one, according to a new study. Despite "The Real Cost" awareness campaign launched by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2018, nearly one third of American teenagers are estimated to use e-cigarettes, the researchers said.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Communication, highlights the limited impact of the FDA campaign, while also using deep learning - an artificial intelligence method - to better understand the marketing tactics used by vaping companies.
"US public health officials have been calling vaping among youth an epidemic and have been putting a lot of effort into trying to stop this epidemic by introducing #TheRealCost anti-vaping campaign but this stark imbalance in the volume of posts has caused the FDA message to be overwhelmed by marketing from the vaping brands," said study researcher Julia Vassey from University of California in the US.
Many teenagers continue to view e-cigarettes as healthier than conventional cigarettes, but vaping is associated with inflammation, reduced immune responses and breathing troubles, the study said.
To further understand how vaping is perceived on social media, research team collected 245,894 Instagram posts spanning from before and after the #TheRealCost campaign launch.
The team also conducted interviews with five vaping influencers and eight college-age social media users.
"We focused on Instagram because the vaping influencers we interviewed for this study identified Instagram as their most important social media marketing platform," Vassey explained.
"Based on the results, the FDA anti-vaping campaign is not very popular and we saw Instagram user comments disputing the FDA claims of damaging health effects from nicotine and calling the campaign propaganda," Vassey added.
In contrast to the FDA's intentions, the study found that vaping posts received nearly three times more "likes" after the campaign launch.
They also found that there were six times as many posts that had greater than 100 likes.
According to the researchers, participants in the focus groups suggested that the anti-vaping campaign promoted scare tactics rather than offering guidance on how to quit vaping.
