142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

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Gauging the Public Response to the CVS Caremark Voluntary Ban of Tobacco Products via Twitter

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Sunday, November 16, 2014

Youn Ok Lee, PhD , Public Health Policy Research, RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC
Annice E. Kim, PhD, MPH , Public Health Policy Research Program, RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC
Heather Hansen, MPP , Public Health Policy Program, RTI International, Washington, DC
Background: Pharmacies are health care settings where tobacco products are commonly sold. On February 5, 2014, CVS Caremark announced that its store will no longer sell tobacco products nationwide. Organizations like the APHA are urging other retailers to follow suit. This voluntary policy is unprecedented and little is known about the public response to it. Twitter is an online microblogging social media platform that rapidly delivers over 500 million tweets per day.

Methods: Crimson Hexagon was used to monitor Twitter conversations using the keywords ‘CVS’ AND ‘tobacco’, ‘cigarette’, OR ‘cigarettes’ from February 5 - 6, 2014. Using the opinion analysis algorithm, conversations collected were categorized to describe the public’s sentiment toward the announcement as well as the main content themes in the conversation.

Results:  There were approximately 99,000 related tweets on the day of the announcement, and 25,000 on the following day. Of these, about 36% (N=5,969) more tweets were negative (N=19,035) than were positive (N=13,066). The top Twitter mentions in addition to CVS Caremark were news sources; however, the sources for the top 10 retweeted posts included those such as Marco Rubio and funnyordie and hashtags including #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter) and #makesnosense.

Discussion: Twitter data suggest that the public response to CVS Caremark’s announcement to stop selling tobacco products was mixed. While the top Twitter mentions were CVS and news sources, the most popular retweets and hashtags suggest that conservative political and humorous messages were significant themes in the initial public response. Tweet content themes are presented.

Learning Areas:

Public health or related laws, regulations, standards, or guidelines
Public health or related public policy

Learning Objectives:
Describe the public response to the CVS Caremark announcement ending sales of tobacco products in their stores. Discuss the dominant popular themes in the Twitter social media activity following the announcement.

Keyword(s): Tobacco Control, Social Media

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have published peer reviewed papers and led studies on tobacco use behaviors, policies, and interventions.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

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