Potential impact of a COVID-19 and smoking paper on Twitter users' attitudes toward smoking: Observational Study

• Published in: JMIR formative research 2021-04
• Main Authors: Tao, Chunliang, Diaz, Destiny, Xie, Zidian, Chen, Long, Li, Dongmei, O' Connor, Richard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2561-326X

A cross-sectional study conducted by French researchers showed that the rate of current daily smoking was significantly lower in COVID-19 patients than in the French general population. We aim to examine the dissemination of this Miyara et al. study among Twitter users and whether a shift in their attitudes towards smoking occurred after its publication on April 21st, 2020. Twitter posts were crawled between April 14th and May 4th, 2020 by the Tweepy stream API, using a COVID-19 related keyword query. After filtering, the final 1,929 tweets were classified into three groups: 1) tweets not related to Miyara et al. study before it was published; 2) tweets not related to Miyara et al. study after it was published; 3) tweets related to Miyara et al. study after it was published. The tweets' attitudes towards smoking were compared among the above three groups using multinomial logistic regression models in statistical analysis software R. The temporal analysis showed a peak in the number of tweets discussing the results from the Miyara et al. study right after its publication. Multinomial logistic regression models on sentiment scores showed the proportion of negative attitudes toward smoking in tweets related to Miyara et al. study after it was published (17.07%) was significantly lower than tweets not related to the Miyara et al. study either before (34.92%, P < 0.001) or after the Miyara et al. study was published (34.34%, P < 0.001). The public's attitude toward smoking shifted in a positive direction after the Miyara et al. study found a lower incidence of COVID-19 cases in daily smokers.