Vaporous Marketing: Uncovering Pervasive Electronic Cigarette Advertisements on Twitter

Understand

Background: Twitter has become the "wild-west" of marketing and promotional strategies for advertisement agencies.

• Electronic cigarettes have been heavily marketed across Twitter feeds, offering discounts, "kid-friendly" flavors, algorithmically generated false testimonials, and free samples.
• Methods:All electronic cigarette keyword related tweets from a 10% sample of Twitter spanning January 2012 through December 2014 (approximately 850,000 total tweets) were identified and categorized as Automated or Organic by combining a keyword classification and a machine trained Human Detection algorithm.
• A sentiment analysis using Hedonometrics was performed on Organic tweets to quantify the change in consumer sentiments over time.