An Empirical Analysis of Social Interaction on Tobacco-Oriented Social Networks

Social media is widely utilized in the tobacco control campaigns. It is a great challenge to evaluate the efficiency of tobacco control policies on social network sites and find gaps among tobacco-oriented social networks. In this paper, we construct three tobacco-oriented social networks according to user interaction on Facebook tobacco-related fan pages. We further investigate the interaction patterns including temporal distribution and interaction patterns to reveal the differences of tobacco-oriented social networks. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that: 1) the user interaction on the pro-tobacco fan pages is more active. Fan pages for tobacco promotion are more successful in obtaining more user attention. 2) The gap between tobacco promotion and tobacco control is widening. These empirical results can provide us significant insights into understanding the evolutionary patterns of social interaction in tobacco-oriented social networks and further help the government departments of tobacco control to make reasonable decisions.