Abstract
BACKGROUND: Information and misinformation on the internet about e-cigarette harms may increase smokers' misperceptions of e-cigarettes. There is limited research on smokers' engagement with information and misinformation about e-cigarettes on social media.
OBJECTIVE: This study assessed smokers' likelihood to engage with-defined as replying, retweeting, liking, and sharing-tweets that contain information and misinformation and uncertainty about the harms of e-cigarettes.
METHODS: We conducted a web-based randomized controlled trial among 2400 UK and US adult smokers who did not vape in the past 30 days. Participants were randomly assigned to view four tweets in one of four conditions: (1) e-cigarettes are as harmful or more harmful than smoking, (2) e-cigarettes are completely harmless, (3) uncertainty about e-cigarette harms, or (4) control (physical activity). The outcome measure was participants' likelihood of engaging with tweets, which comprised the sum of whether they would reply, retweet, like, and share each tweet. We fitted Poisson regression models to predict the likelihood of engagement with tweets among 974 Twitter users and 1287 non-Twitter social media users, adjusting for covariates and stratified by UK and US participants.
RESULTS: Among Twitter users, participants were more likely to engage with tweets in condition 1 (e-cigarettes are as harmful or more harmful than smoking) than in condition 2 (e-cigarettes are completely harmless). Among other social media users, participants were more likely to likely to engage with tweets in condition 1 than in conditions 2 and 3 (e-cigarettes are completely harmless and uncertainty about e-cigarette harms).
CONCLUSIONS: Tweets stating information and misinformation that e-cigarettes were as harmful or more harmful than smoking regular cigarettes may receive higher engagement than tweets indicating e-cigarettes were completely harmless.
TRIAL REGISTRATION: International Standard Randomized Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN) 16082420; https://doi.org/10.1186/ISRCTN16082420.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e27183 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | JMIR public health and surveillance |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 21 Dec 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This study was funded by the Cancer Research UK Cancer Policy Research Centre Innovation Grant (C60153/A28664). CW is funded by a Cancer Research UK Population Research Postdoctoral Fellowship (C60153/A23895). JD is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, K23 DA045766. ASLT is supported by the National Cancer Institute of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA; R03CA212544-01A1) and the National Cancer Institute (1R01CA237670-01A1). JB is supported by the National Cancer Institute (R01CA246418). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or FDA.
Publisher Copyright:
© Jessica Liu, Caroline Wright, Philippa Williams, Olga Elizarova, Jennifer Dahne, Jiang Bian, Yunpeng Zhao, Andy S L Tan. Originally published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (https://publichealth.jmir.org), 21.12.2021. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://publichealth.jmir.org, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.
Keywords
- e-cigarettes
- misinformation
- social media