Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Oct 7, 2020
Date Accepted: Dec 9, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Dec 21, 2020
A Perspective of Electronic Cigarette Users on the COVID-19 Pandemic in Twitter: Observational Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Previous studies indicated electronic cigarette users might be more vulnerable to COVID-19 infections and could develop more severe symptoms once contracted COVID-19 due to their impaired immune responses to virus infections. Social media has been widely used to express users’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Objective:
We aimed to examine the responses of electronic cigarette Twitter users to the COVID-19 pandemic using Twitter data.
Methods:
The COVID-19 dataset containing COVID-19-related Twitter posts (tweets) between March 5th, 2020, and April 3rd, 2020 was collected using Twitter Streaming API with COVID-19-related keywords. Ecig group included Twitter users who did not have commercial accounts but ever posted e-cigarette-related tweets between May 2019 and August 2019. Twitter users who did not post any e-cigarette-related tweets were defined as Non-Ecig group. Sentiment analysis was conducted to compare sentiment scores towards the COVID-19 pandemic between both groups to determine if the sentiment expressed was positive, negative, or neutral. Topic modeling was used to compare the main topics discussed between the two groups.
Results:
The US COVID-19 dataset consisted of 4,500,248 COVID-19-related tweets from 187,399 unique Twitter users in the Ecig group and 11,479,773 COVID-19-related tweets from 2,511,659 unique Twitter users in the Non-Ecig group. Sentiment analysis showed that the Ecig group have more negative sentiment scores than the Non-Ecig group. Results from topic modeling indicated the Ecig group had more concern about COVID-19 related death, while the Non-Ecig group cared more about the government’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Conclusions:
Electronic cigarette Twitter users have more concern about COVID-19 pandemic. Twitter is a useful tool to timely monitor public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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