Public perceptions of the FDA’s marketing authorization of Vuse on Twitter/X

Abstract

IntroductionOn October 12, 2021, the FDA issued its first marketing granted orders for Vuse, the e-cigarette product by R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company. The public perceptions and reactions to the FDA’s Vuse authorization are prevalent on social media platforms such as Twitter/X. We aim to understand public perceptions of the FDA’s Vuse authorization in the US using Twitter/X data.MethodsThrough the Twitter/X streaming API (Application Programming Interface), 3,852 tweets between October 12, 2021, and October 23, 2021, were downloaded using the keyword of Vuse. With the elimination of retweets, irrelevant tweets, and tweets from other countries, the final dataset consisted of 523 relevant tweets from the US. Based on their attitudes toward the FDA authorization on Vuse, these tweets were coded into three major categories: positive, negative, and neutral. These tweets were further manually classified into different categories based on their contents.ResultsThere was a large peak on Twitter/X mentioning FDA’s Vuse authorization on October 13, 2021, just after the authorization was announced. Of the 523 US tweets related to FDA’s Vuse authorization, 6.12% (n=32) were positive, 26.77% (n=140) were negative, and 67.11% (n=351) were neutral. In positive tweets, the dominant subcategory was Cessation Claims (n=18, 56.25%). In negative tweets, the topics Health Risk (n=43, 30.71%), Criticize Authorization (n=42, 30.00%), and Big Tobacco (n=40, 38.57%) were the major topics. News (n=271, 77.21%) was the most prevalent topic among neutral tweets. In addition, tweets with a positive attitude tend to have more likes.DiscussionPublic perceptions and discussions on Twitter/X regarding the FDA’s Vuse authorization in the US showed that Twitter/X users were more likely to show a negative than a positive attitude with a major concern about health risks.