title: Vaporous Marketing: Uncovering Pervasive Electronic Cigarette Advertisements on Twitter.
abstract: 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. Commercialized tweets were topically categorized with key phrasal pattern matching.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The overwhelming majority (80%) of tweets were classified as automated or promotional in nature. The majority of these tweets were coded as commercialized (83.65% in 2013), up to 33% of which offered discounts or free samples and appeared on over a billion twitter feeds as impressions. The positivity of Organic (human) classified tweets has decreased over time (5.84 in 2013 to 5.77 in 2014) due to a relative increase in the negative words 'ban', 'tobacco', 'doesn't', 'drug', 'against', 'poison', 'tax' and a relative decrease in the positive words like 'haha', 'good', 'cool'. Automated tweets are more positive than organic (6.17 versus 5.84) due to a relative increase in the marketing words like 'best', 'win', 'buy', 'sale', 'health', 'discount' and a relative decrease in negative words like 'bad', 'hate', 'stupid', 'don't'.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Due to the youth presence on Twitter and the clinical uncertainty of the long term health complications of electronic cigarette consumption, the protection of public health warrants scrutiny and potential regulation of social media marketing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|Computational Story Lab, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|Department of Surgery, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.
authors.forename: Eric M
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1512-2038
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Clark
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|Vermont Center for Behavior and Health, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|Global Health Economics Unit of the Vermont Center for Clinical and Translational Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.
authors.forename: Chris A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.affiliation: Computational Story Lab, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|University of California Berkeley, School of Information, Berkeley CA, United States of America.
authors.forename: Jake Ryland
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Williams
authors.affiliation: Vermont Center for Behavior and Health, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.
authors.forename: Allison N
authors.initials: AN
authors.lastname: Kurti
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.
authors.forename: Mitchell Craig
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Norotsky
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|Computational Story Lab, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.
authors.forename: Christopher M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Danforth
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|Computational Story Lab, Burlington, VT, United States of America.|Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.
authors.forename: Peter Sheridan
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Dodds
mesh_terms: D000329:Advertising; D003132:Commerce; D000067088:Direct-to-Consumer Advertising; D066300:Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems / Q000191:economics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D040541:Marketing; D016540:Smoking Cessation; D061108:Social Media