References to e-cigarette brands, e-juice flavors on TikTok rose from 2019 to 2022
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Key takeaways:
- An AI algorithm trained with images of e-cigarette-related objects from Instagram detected these objects in TikTok videos.
- More videos from 2022 vs. 2019 show e-juice flavor names and e-cigarette brands.
TikTok videos that feature e-juice flavor names and e-cigarette brand names increased in prevalence from 2019 to 2022, according to results published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research.
“E-cigarette use among adolescents remains a concern,” Julia Vassey, MPH, health behavior researcher at Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California, told Healio. “While e-cigarette use among high school students declined in 2023 based on the National Youth Tobacco Survey, it did not decline among middle school children. Among current users, 25% of adolescents reported using e-cigarettes daily.
“Exposure to social media posts featuring e-cigarettes, including marketing content, is a risk factor for increased e-cigarette use and initiation among youth,” Vassey added. “Considering the popularity of TikTok and the growing popularity of influencer marketing, the increase in e-cigarette content promoted by influencers is problematic. Studies show that influencers are perceived as more trusted sources compared to traditional advertising, and thus e-cigarette content promoted by influencers might be of even higher risk for adolescents compared to traditional ads.”
To evaluate the prevalence of e-cigarette products posted on TikTok, Vassey and colleagues created a deep learning (artificial intelligence [AI])-based object detection model.
Researchers trained their model using 6,999 posts from Instagram, each labeled based on the object shown — mod/pod devices, e-juice containers, packaging boxes, nicotine warning labels, e-juice flavors, e-cigarette brand names or smoke clouds — and then tested its detection ability for each object using images from 20 Instagram and TikTok videos (1,509 frames).
The model had mean average precision scores above 0.8 in detecting packaging boxes (0.84), nicotine warning labels (0.86), e-juice flavor names (0.89) and e-juice containers (0.89).
According to researchers, the model’s detection was lower for e-cigarette brand name (0.71), pod device (0.67), mod device (0.54) and smoke cloud (0.46).
Notably, the model was successful in detecting all the video frames with e-cigarette-related objects and all the frames without these objects.
In order to assess how the prevalence of these products on TikTok has changed from 2019 to 2022, researchers used their model to find products in 14,072 e-cigarette-related promotional videos (10,276,485 frames) on the platform.
Most of the videos were posted in 2021 (5,438 videos), followed by 2022 (4,425 videos), 2020 (3,423 videos) and 2019 (786 videos).
According to the model’s detection, smoke clouds appeared the most (65%) out of the eight objects in these videos. Many videos also featured mod devices (47%) and pod devices (42%).
Between 2019 and 2022, researchers observed a 15% rise in the prevalence of pod devices and nearly an 100% rise in the prevalence of e-juice flavor names and e-cigarette brand names in these videos.
“The growth in the proportion of e-juice flavor names and brand names in the videos was most interesting because it showed the growth over time in the number of e-cigarette brands and flavors in e-cigarette-related online marketing materials,” Vassey told Healio.
E-juices featured in TikTok videos went up by 33% from 2021 to 2022, according to researchers.
Only 3% of the TikTok videos from 2019 featured nicotine warning labels, and this did not go up by much in the videos from 2022 (9%).
“Future studies may apply AI to analyze the prevalence of other marketing features used by social media influencers next to e-cigarette promotions that may contribute to the increase of this content appeal,” Vassey told Healio.
“Public health officials may want to consider increasing regulations of substance use-related influencer marketing on social media,” she added.
Reference:
- Social media posts that promote tobacco are increasing, AI detection technology finds. https://keck.usc.edu/social-media-posts-that-promote-tobacco-are-increasing-ai-detection-technology-finds/. Published Nov. 29, 2023. Accessed Dec. 6, 2023.