Content Analysis of JUUL Electronic Cigarette Posts and Comments on Instagram.

Abstract: With an estimated 10.8 million adult users, particularly amongst 18 to 24-year olds, e-cigarette use is an increasingly serious health issue within the United States. These products are often promoted as smoking cessation devices for use in quitting smoking and nicotine replacement therapy. JUUL, a leading brand of e-cigarettes, is also heavily featured in online social media posts. This content analysis examined posts related to JUUL on the Instagram for their product relevance, how they are promoted, and how they are featured. Descriptive analysis and unsupervised topic modeling were used in preparation for future analysis involving additional relevance coding to analyze for links between content features and topic modeling results. Preliminary results reveal our TM topics and terms for analysis, a lack of promotion of JUULs as smoking cessation/NRT devices by commercial interests, and that half of JUUL-related posts were not JUUL relevant, suggesting its use to promote unrelated posts.