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According to a new analysis by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the Twitter account of the JUUL brand of electronic cigarettes attracts teens to the point that at least a quarter of its followers appear to be under 18 years old.
Many of these minors – who are illegal to sell nicotine delivery products – retweet JUUL's messages, boosting his ads to a vulnerable population. The results of the study are published today in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
"Juul's representatives said the company was not trying to target teens with their advertising or sales, but our research clearly indicates that a sizeable proportion of their Twitter audience is exactly that population." said senior author Kar-Hai Chu, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at Pitt's Center for Media, Technology and Health Research. "This is very worrying because teens exposed to the marketing of the electronic cigarette are more likely to use it, so young adults who use it are four times more likely than their non-vaping peers to use it. switch to traditional tobacco. " cigarettes. "
JUUL (pronounced "jewel") is an e-cigarette that looks like a USB key and can be connected to a computer to recharge. A "pod" of e-liquid containing nicotine is loaded into the JUUL and heated, the user inhaling the steam. JUUL steam contains about twice the nicotine concentration found in other electronic cigarettes and comes in a variety of youth-friendly flavors, including mango and fruit mix.
Adolescents whose brain is still developing are proven to be more sensitive to nicotine addiction than adults According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nine out of 10 smokers started before age 18.
Chu and his colleagues started the analysis after finding that JUUL was particularly attractive to teenagers. These were using social media to discuss how to get it and hide it by using it at school. The use of terms such as "juuling" and the personalization of the appearance of the devices are also part of the youth culture. Twitter has a gateway feature that can screen for age and discourage minor followers (many brands of alcohol use it), but JUUL does not Not use.
The research team collected 3,239 tweets on JUUL's official Twitter account, @JUULvapor, for a year between February 2017 and January 2018. These tweets were retweeted 1,124 times by 721 unique users of Twitter. Human trained coders examined each of the user's Twitter profiles to determine if he was under the age of 18. If the user shared an age, it made the job easier. Otherwise, the coders looked for clues, for example if the user mentioned a grade level or age-specific event, for example "I'm excited about my next 16-year-old candy". If in doubt, the user was labeled adult.
When a person retweet, the original tweet is shared with all its subscribers, even if none of them follows the handle that originally issued the tweet. In the JUUL tweets reviewed by the researchers, some were retweeted in a chain that extended to four Twitter users.
"When that happens, people who see the retweet get it from a person and not from a brand." This adds a level of standardization and protects viewers from the impersonal element of advertising, especially if the person who retweeted it is a trusted friend or someone they aspire to, "Chu said.
Public health agencies could conduct similar analyzes on social media to find networks of teenagers who popularize the use of the electronic cigarette and send them misinterpretation messages, even going as far as identifying schools associated with social media accounts of students who glorify the vaping and institute programs to prevent the use of electronic cigarette, said Chu. Further research should be conducted to determine whether such preventive efforts are effective, he added.
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