US News and Social Media Framing around Vaping
Keyu Chen, Marzieh Babaeianjelodar, Yiwen Shi, Rohan Aanegola, Lam Yin, Cheung, Preslav Ivanov Nakov, Shweta Yadav, Angus Bancroft, Ashiqur R., KhudaBukhsh, Munmun De Choudhury, Frederick L. Altice, and Navin Kumar

TL;DR
This study compares how US news and social media have framed vaping from 2008 to 2021, revealing distinct patterns in narratives, with social media showing more varied and evolving perspectives than news outlets.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive analysis of framing differences over time using multiple NLP techniques, highlighting social media's role in shaping vaping perceptions.
Findings
Social media discussions are more varied and dynamic than news media.
News framing shifted with regulatory trends, focusing on risk and bans.
Social media emphasizes vaping as a smoking cessation tool and a social practice.
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate how vaping is framed differently (2008-2021) between US news and social media. We analyze 15,711 news articles and 1,231,379 Facebook posts about vaping to study the differences in framing between media varieties. We use word embeddings to provide two-dimensional visualizations of the semantic changes around vaping for news and for social media. We detail that news media framing of vaping shifted over time in line with emergent regulatory trends, such as; flavored vaping bans, with little discussion around vaping as a smoking cessation tool. We found that social media discussions were far more varied, with transitions toward vaping both as a public health harm and as a smoking cessation tool. Our cloze test, dynamic topic model, and question answering showed similar patterns, where social media, but not news media, characterizes vaping as combustible…
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Taxonomy
TopicsGender, Feminism, and Media · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Media Studies and Communication
