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Scientific American

July 1, 2019

1 min read

Social Media Bots Deceive E-cigarette Users

Social media bots promote unproved benefits of e-cigarettes

By Mark Fischetti

Toshiro Shimada Getty Images

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Vaping is hot. A clever analysis of Twitter posts reveals one possible reason: automated accounts, or bots, may be convincing people that electronic cigarettes are beneficial. Researchers analyzed 2.2 million tweets about vaping and discovered that hashtags used in tweets by humans differ from those in tweets by bots. Bots focus on new products and on vaping as an effective way to stop smoking tobacco even though “there is limited scientific evidence for that,” says study leader Jon-Patrick Allem, an assistant professor of research at the University of Southern California. Hashtags written by humans emphasize people’s lifestyles—vaping is cool, vapers are a community. Allem speculates the bots are propagated by manufacturers or by organizations that promote vaper rights or that are generally against government regulation.

Credit: Sree Priyanka Uppu; Source: “E-Cigarette Surveillance with Social Media Data: Social Bots, Emerging Topics, and Trends,” by Jon-Patrick Allem et al. in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Vol. 3, No. 4, Article E98; 2017

Mark Fischetti has been a senior editor at Scientific American for 17 years and has covered sustainability issues, including climate, weather, environment, energy, food, water, biodiversity, population, and more. He assigns and edits feature articles, commentaries and news by journalists and scientists and also writes in those formats. He edits History, the magazine's department looking at science advances throughout time. He was founding managing editor of two spinoff magazines: Scientific American Mind and Scientific American Earth 3.0. His 2001 freelance article for the magazine, "Drowning New Orleans," predicted the widespread disaster that a storm like Hurricane Katrina would impose on the city. His video What Happens to Your Body after You Die?, has more than 12 million views on YouTube. Fischetti has written freelance articles for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Fast Company, and many others. He co-authored the book Weaving the Web with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, which tells the real story of how the Web was created. He also co-authored The New Killer Diseases with microbiologist Elinor Levy. Fischetti is a former managing editor of IEEE Spectrum Magazine and of Family Business Magazine. He has a physics degree and has twice served as the Attaway Fellow in Civic Culture at Centenary College of Louisiana, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 2021 he received the American Geophysical Union's Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism, which celebrates a career of outstanding reporting on the Earth and space sciences. He has appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, CNN, the History Channel, NPR News and many news radio stations. Follow Fischetti on X (formerly Twitter) @markfischetti

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Scientific American Magazine Vol 321 Issue 1This article was originally published with the title “Smoke Screen” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 321 No. 1 (), p. 92
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0719-92
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