Smoke signals: Reddit users concerned by health risks of vaping

Alexandra DeLucia Doctoral candidate, computer science "Our goal is to shed light on how the public, in their natural conversations, describe health concerns associated with vaping e-cigarettes." To find detailed discussions about e-cigarettes, the team turned to Reddit, with its 55 million daily users and about 10 million daily posts. In addition, Reddit conversations are conveniently organized into smaller communities called "subreddits," allowing the researchers to identify conversations related to vaping and to have confidence that the conversations being analyzed were relevant. "What we learned was that people posting in discussion threads about e-cigarette use on Reddit primarily describe respiratory, gastrointestinal, and cardiovascular concerns," DeLucia said. Next steps for this research include applying this method to additional Reddit communities to discover perceived health outcomes of other products.