skip to main content
10.1145/3239438.3239439acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicmhiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Understanding of Users' Response to the Intervention of FDA's New Deeming Rules in Twitter

Published: 08 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Background: On May 5, 2016, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finalized a rule extending its authority to all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, cigars, hookah tobacco and pipe tobacco, among others, which aims to help protect Americans from the dangers of tobacco and nicotine, especially the youth. The policy can be seen as a new intervention and become a hot discussion topic among the users in Twitter. Objective: This paper aims to examine the tweets related to the FDA's new policy in the social media, and gain a systematic understanding of users' responses to the intervention and the regulation. Methods: A total of 13864 tweets related to the policy from May 1st, 2016 to May 31st, 2016 were collected and analyzed, the support and opposition viewpoints about the six aspects including Regulation, Health, Industry, Democracy, Science, and Children were summarized, the time-sequence co-occurrence pattern of high-frequency words and the analysis of retweet and user dissemination network were analyzed. Results: Tweets are classified into six broad themes: Regulation, Health, Children, Industry, Science, and Democracy, the number of tweets about the six themes is 7547, 2764, 1678, 795, 670, 45. There are more supports on Regulation, Health, Science, and Children, the ratio of support(opposition) on the four themes are 80.6%(19.4%), 74.9%(25.1%), 85.9%(14.1%), 75.8%(24.2%), respectively, as for the themes of industry and democracy, most users hold the opposing view. The co-occurrence frequencies of "vaping" and "vape", "stocks" and "bigTobacco", "vapingsaveslives" and "ivapeivote" are 328, 61, 104. A network with 222 retweets and 361 replies is constructed. Among the 361 replies, there are 62 negative replies accounting for 17.2%, 120 positive replies accounting for 33.2%, and 179 neutral replies accounting for 49.6%. It shows clearly that social media such as Twitter can be employed to gather valuable user feedback effectively and response on the government regulation.

References

[1]
Vance K, Howe W, Dellavalle R P. Social internet sites as a source of public health information{J}. Dermatologic clinics, 2009, 27(2): 133--136.
[2]
Paul M J, Dredze M. You are what you Tweet: Analyzing Twitter for public health{J}. ICWSM, 2011, 20: 265--272.
[3]
Prier KW, Smith MS, Giraud-Carrier C, Hanson CL. Identifying Health-Related Topics on Twitter. In: Vol 9021.; 2011: 18--25.
[4]
Parmelee J H, Bichard S L. Politics and the Twitter revolution: How tweets influence the relationship between political leaders and the public{M}. Lexington Books, 2011.
[5]
Park C S. Does Twitter motivate involvement in politics? Tweeting, opinion leadership, and political engagement{J}. Computers in Human Behavior, 2013, 29(4): 1641--1648.
[6]
Jin S A A, Phua J. Following celebrities' tweets about brands: The impact of Twitter-based electronic word-of-mouth on consumers' source credibility perception, buying intention, and social identification with celebrities{J}. Journal of Advertising, 2014, 43(2): 181--195.
[7]
Mostafa M M. More than words: Social networks' text mining for consumer brand sentiments{J}. Expert Systems with Applications, 2013, 40(10): 4241--4251.
[8]
Vergeer M, Hermans L. Campaigning on Twitter: Microblogging and online social networking as campaign tools in the 2010 general elections in the Netherlands{J}. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2013, 18(4): 399--419.
[9]
Harris JK, Moreland-Russell S, Choucair B, Mansour R, Staub M, Simmons K. Tweeting for and Against Public Health Policy: Response to the Chicago Department of Public Health's Electronic Cigarette Twitter Campaign. J Med Internet Res. 2014;16(10):e238.
[10]
Moorhead S A, Hazlett D E, Harrison L, et al. A new dimension of health care: systematic review of the uses, benefits, and limitations of social media for health communication{J}. Journal of medical Internet research, 2013, 15(4): e85.
[11]
Scanfeld D, Scanfeld V, Larson E L. Dissemination of health information through social networks: Twitter and antibiotics{J}. American journal of infection control, 2010, 38(3): 182--188.
[12]
Yang Y, Tang J, Leung C W, et al. RAIN: Social Role-Aware Information Diffusion{C}//AAAI. 2015: 367--373.
[13]
Polosa R, Caponnetto P. Enabling smokers to refrain from smoking: role of electronic cigarettes{J}. 2013.
[14]
Grana R, Benowitz N, Glantz S A. Background paper on e-cigarettes (electronic nicotine delivery systems){J}. 2013.
[15]
King B A, Alam S, Promoff G, et al. Awareness and ever-use of electronic cigarettes among US adults, 2010--2011{J}. Nicotine & Tobacco Research, 2013, 15(9): 1623--1627.
[16]
FDA takes significant steps to protect Americans from dangers of tobacco through new regulation. http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm499234.htm. Published 2016. Accessed May 5, 2016.
[17]
FDA. Extending Authorities to All Tobacco Products, Including E-Cigarettes, Cigars, and Hookah. http://www.fda.gov/TobaccoProducts/Labeling/ucm388395.htm. Published 2016. Accessed July 6, 2016.
[18]
Cole-Lewis H, Varghese A, Sanders A, Schwarz M, Pugatch J, Augustson E. Assessing Electronic Cigarette-Related Tweets for Sentiment and Content Using Supervised Machine Learning. J Med Internet Res. 2015;17(8):e208.

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)They May not Work! An Evaluation of Eleven Sentiment Analysis Tools on Seven Social Media DatasetsJournal of Biomedical Informatics10.1016/j.jbi.2022.104142(104142)Online publication date: Jul-2022

Index Terms

  1. Understanding of Users' Response to the Intervention of FDA's New Deeming Rules in Twitter

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ICMHI '18: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics
    June 2018
    270 pages
    ISBN:9781450363891
    DOI:10.1145/3239438
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    In-Cooperation

    • Graduate School of Library, Information, and Media Studies, University of Tsukuba, Japan: Graduate School of Library, Information, and Media Studies, University of Tsukuba, Japan

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 08 June 2018

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. Deeming rule
    2. E-cigarette
    3. Intervention
    4. Regulations
    5. Social media

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Conference

    ICMHI '18

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)5
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
    Reflects downloads up to 20 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2022)They May not Work! An Evaluation of Eleven Sentiment Analysis Tools on Seven Social Media DatasetsJournal of Biomedical Informatics10.1016/j.jbi.2022.104142(104142)Online publication date: Jul-2022

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media