US News and Social Media Framing around Vaping

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 cigarette substitute. We use n-grams to detail that social media data first centered on vaping as a smoking cessation tool, and in 2019 moved toward narratives around vaping regulation, similar to news media frames. Overall, social media tracks the evolution of vaping as a social practice, while news media reflects more risk based concerns. A strength of our work is how the different techniques we have applied validate each other. Stakeholders may utilize our findings to intervene around the framing of vaping, and may design communications campaigns that improve the way society sees vaping, thus possibly aiding smoking cessation; and reducing youth vaping.