A Perspective of Electronic Cigarette Users on the COVID-19 Pandemic in Twitter: Observational Study (Preprint)

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 contained COVID-19-related Twitter posts (tweets) between March 5th, 2020 and April 3rd, 2020. Ecig group included Twitter users who didn’t have commercial accounts but ever retweeted e-cigarette promotion posts between May 2019 and August 2019. Twitter users who didn’t post or retweet 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. Topic modeling was used to compare the main topics discussed between the two groups. RESULTS The US COVID-19 dataset consisted of 1,112,558 COVID-19-related tweets from 15,657 unique Twitter users in the Ecig group and 9,789,584 COVID-19-related tweets from 2,128,942 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 has more concern towards the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitter is a useful tool to timely monitor public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.