An Empirical Analysis of Tobacco-Oriented Social Networks to Characterize Social Interaction

Abstract

Tobacco "wars" are finding a new home on social media. This type of media, assessing the present situation is critical for tobacco control activism. This research defines user engagement and social influence using information-theoretic techniques and social network analysis to demonstrate the influence of tobacco-related user-generated material. Our empirical investigations show that the explosion of pro-tobacco material has long-term impacts with greater influence and more active users, as well as in the tobacco control across the world, the absence of social media tools. User involvement in the pro-tobacco community seems to be more engaged, and tobacco marketing content created by users is more successful in capturing the attention of the user. In addition, we construct an investigation and three tobacco-related social networks with their structural features. We find that the pro-tobacco systems exceed someone else in size, implying that a large number of people are exposed to pro-tobacco information. Such findings suggest that the gap between tobacco control and tobacco promotion is growing, and that tobacco control may be going in the wrong direction via social media towards tobacco promotion.