E-cigarettes are heavily marketed on Twitter open forums where users have access to all information regarding its availability.
E-cigarettes are routinely advertised on the internet, television, radio and social media without anyone knowing the extent of its harmful effects. Social media sites are seen by marketers as new opportunities to promote their products. Taking advantage of this ease of promotion, e-cigarette manufacturing companies are using Twitter as a prominent marketing source. A new study from the University of Illinois at Chicago says that e-cigarettes are heavily marketed on Twitter with tweets offering direct links to commercial sites promoting the use of electronic smoking pipes.
Tobacco cigarettes have been banned from being advertised in traditional media but e-cigarettes, also known as vaping pens or e-hookas, have not attracted similar prohibitions, yet. The researchers of the study hope to push FDA toward future regulations on the marketing of e-cigarettes and related products.
For the study, researchers gathered two months worth of tweets and metadata related to e-cigarettes in 2012. Researchers were able to capture more than 70,000 tweets and found 90 percent were commercial and the rest were tweets from consumers about the product. Out of the commercial tweets, 94 percent had links to websites promoting the use of e-cigarettes, while only 11 percent of individual tweets were linked. Eleven percent of the commercial tweets also promoted quitting smoking with the use of e-cigs and one-third offered discount coupons for purchasing the products.
The researchers fear the openness of Twitter, which does not offer any privacy controls like Facebook, gives easy access to all age groups. Key word search can give results linking users to commercial websites to purchase e-cigarettes and this acts as a "gateway" to other tobacco products, researchers warn.
"Given the substantial youth presence on social media, the marketing of e-cigarettes on those platforms may entice non-smokers - youth in particular - to experiment with and initiate e-cigarette use," authors wrote.
The study is published in the July 2014 issue of Tobacco Control, released on Monday.
