title: Characterizing Social Interaction in Tobacco-Oriented Social Networks: An Empirical Analysis.
abstract: Social media is becoming a new battlefield for tobacco "wars". Evaluating the current situation is very crucial for the advocacy of tobacco control in the age of social media. To reveal the impact of tobacco-related user-generated content, this paper characterizes user interaction and social influence utilizing social network analysis and information theoretic approaches. Our empirical studies demonstrate that the exploding pro-tobacco content has long-lasting effects with more active users and broader influence, and reveal the shortage of social media resources in global tobacco control. It is found that the user interaction in the pro-tobacco group is more active, and user-generated content for tobacco promotion is more successful in obtaining user attention. Furthermore, we construct three tobacco-related social networks and investigate the topological patterns of these tobacco-related social networks. We find that the size of the pro-tobacco network overwhelms the others, which suggests a huge number of users are exposed to the pro-tobacco content. These results indicate that the gap between tobacco promotion and tobacco control is widening and tobacco control may be losing ground to tobacco promotion in social media.
authors.affiliation: 1] School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China [2] Department of Management Information Systems, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
authors.forename: Yunji
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Xiaolong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Management Information Systems, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA [2] State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Daniel Dajun
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Zeng
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.
authors.forename: Xingshe
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: College of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale, AZ, USA.
authors.forename: Scott James
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Leischow
authors.affiliation: Department of Decision and Information Sciences, School of Business Administration, Stetson University, DeLand, FL, USA.
authors.forename: Wingyan
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Chung
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D061108:Social Media; D064424:Tobacco Use; D062789:Tobacco Products