Seeing Through the Smoke
Jiaxi Wu studies how social media influencers promote tobacco products—and hopes to influence how the FDA regulates flavored cigars
Search #swishersweets on Twitter and Instagram and you’ll see hundreds of thousands of posts about the popular flavored cigar brand. On TikTok, thousands of videos show users smoking, singing about smoking and even using colorful Swisher Sweets packaging in art projects.
Jiaxi Wu believes that vibrant social media presence makes the harmful cigars more likely to land in the hands of kids. It’s a theory the emerging media doctoral student is going to test during a two-year, $100,000 fellowship from the American Heart Association’s Tobacco Center for Regulatory Sciences (A-TRAC). She also hopes to provide solutions that will help regulators clamp down on messages that target those too young to legally buy nicotine products.
Flavored cigars haven’t received the media or research attention that e-cigarette and vaping products have. But these cigars, which are often the size of cigarettes and can include candy and fruit flavors that appeal to adolescents, pose many of the same addiction and health risks, including lung, throat and mouth cancer. “Studies suggest that flavors reduce people’s perception of the risk,” Wu says. They’re also cheap—a single cigar can cost less than $1—and easily found in convenience stores and bodegas. “The packages look so good people might think it’s candy.”
And there’s little to stop flavored cigar manufacturers from exploiting that youthful appeal on social media, says Wu. The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has long regulated print and television advertising of tobacco products, but social media represents a new challenge. Individual social networks have their own policies but, says Wu, those rules have limitations. Twitter, for example, prohibits paid advertising for tobacco products but does not regulate influencers who promote the same products. And, she says, tobacco companies use that loophole to market their products to kids and vulnerable communities. “People are now on social media so often, especially young people,” Wu says. “They’re influenced by their idols.” Swisher Sweets often uses music events, and popular performers like Cardi B, to promote its products.
The fellowship began in September and Wu is already conducting social network analysis: mining social media platforms for relevant posts, then analyzing the sentiments expressed and the demographics of the users. She’s also enlisting coders to help analyze the content of more than 2,500 TikTok videos. A later phase of the project will be a nationwide survey of 13–21 year olds about their attitudes toward and use of flavored cigars. The results of Wu’s research will eventually be submitted to the FDA to help inform their policies and regulations.
“Social media is the media of choice among young adults and youths—that is why this project is relevant and important,” says Traci Hong, an associate professor, who—with Jessica Fetterman, an assistant professor at the BU School of Medicine—advises Wu on her project. Fetterman and Hong have been working with BU public health and computer science researchers to study vaping and EVALI, the potentially deadly lung disease associated with electronic cigarettes, and Wu has assisted with that research.
As part of her fellowship, Wu participates in weekly webinars hosted by A-TRAC faculty. The sessions, which include talks from tobacco regulatory researchers and career development training, aim to increase collaboration among fellows and to help them develop careers in tobacco regulatory science research.
Hong says the fellowship “speaks to Jiaxi’s incredible hard work and drive. Our goal is that this opportunity will lead Jiaxi to produce a forward thinking dissertation that informs media theory and tobacco regulatory science.”
