Vaping discussion in the COVID-19 pandemic: An observational study using Twitter data.

Background: With the spread of COVID-19, significant concerns have been raised about the potential increased risk for electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) users for COVID-19 infection and related syndromes. Social media is an increasingly popular source for health information dissemination and discussion, and can affect health outcomes.

Objective: This study aims to identify the topics in the public vaping discussion in COVID-19-related Twitter posts in order to get insight into public vaping-related perceptions, attitudes and concerns, and to discern possible misinformation and misconceptions around vaping in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: Using the tweets ID database maintained by Georgia State University's Panacea Lab, we downloaded the tweets related to COVID-19 from March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, to February 12, 2021. We used R to analyze the tweets that contained a list of 79 keywords related to vaping. After removing duplicates and tweets created by faked accounts or bots, the final data set consisted of 11,337 unique tweets from 7,710 different users. We performed the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithm for topic modeling and carried out a sentiment analysis.

Results: Despite fluctuations, the number of daily tweets was relatively stable (average number of daily tweets = 33.4) with a sole conspicuous spike happening on a few days after August 11, 2020 when a research team published findings that teenagers and young adults who vape face a much higher risk of COVID-19 infection than their peers who do not vape. Topic modeling generated 8 topics: linkage between vaping and risk of COVID-19 infection, vaping pneumonia and the origin of COVID-19, vaping and spread of COVID-19, vaping regulation, calling for quitting vaping, protecting youth, similarity between e-cigarette or vaping-associated lung injury (EVALI) and COVID-19, and sales information. Daily sentiment scores showed that the public sentiment was predominantly negative, but became slightly more positive over the course of the study time period.

Conclusions: While some content in the public discourse on vaping before the COVID-19 pandemic continued in Twitter posts during the COVID-19 time period, new topics emerged. We found a substantial amount of anti-vaping discussion and dominantly negative sentiment around vaping during COVID-19, a sharp contrast to the predominantly pro-vaping voice on social media in the pre-COVID-19 period. Continued monitoring of social media conversations around vaping is needed, and the public health community may consider using social media platforms to actively convey scientific information around vaping and vaping cessation.