Identification and Characterization of Synthetic Nicotine Product Promotion and Sales on Instagram Using Natural Language Processing.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

There has been a rapid proliferation of synthetic nicotine products in recent years, despite newly established regulatory authority and limited research into its health risks. Previous research has implicated social media platforms as an avenue for nicotine product unregulated sales. Yet, little is known about synthetic nicotine product content on social media. We utilized natural language processing to characterize the sales of synthetic nicotine products on Instagram.

Methods

We collected Instagram posts by querying Instagram hashtags (eg, "#tobaccofreenicotine) related to synthetic nicotine. Using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, collected posts were categorized into thematically related topic clusters. Posts within topic clusters rele

SUBMITTER: Shah NA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11494223 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature