Buried in hundreds of social media comments is a candid record of how people think and feel, often in ways that surveys and focus groups can’t capture. Pitt Public Health’s Beth Hoffman, PhD, and Arpita Tripathi, MA, used this material for their study of the Netflix docuseries “Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul,” analyzing YouTube comments to understand how viewers responded to the series and the broader conversation around vaping. Their findings appeared in the September 19 issue of JMIR Formative Research.
Hoffman, an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences (BCHS) who has long studied how health issues play out on social media, believes the medium offers something unique. “Social media data provides a way to capture unfiltered thoughts—what people are really thinking, rather than what they think a researcher wants to hear,” she said.
Tripathi, a BCHS doctoral candidate, came to this approach through training in computational social science. After attending the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, she began exploring ways to combine traditional qualitative coding with automated text analysis. “It’s digital ethnography in so many ways,” she explained. “We’re really out in the wild looking at posts and comments from anonymous people and trying to understand how they think about important public health issues.”
YouTube, they note, is especially fertile ground for this kind of research. Unlike more curated platforms such as Instagram or LinkedIn, it allows anonymity, making it easier for people to be candid. That openness comes with responsibility, though. The study team altered and checked text to ensure commenters can’t be identified, navigating a landscape where ethical guidelines are still catching up.
Their study of more than 500 comments on the JUUL docuseries trailer and video clip revealed two striking patterns. First, many comments didn’t fit neatly into pro- or anti-vaping categories. Instead, they reflected what the researchers termed “complex sentiment” — support for vaping alongside criticism of JUUL’s youth marketing, or acknowledgment of both harm reduction potential and unknown risks.
Second, misinformation was common. About 27% of comments contained potentially misleading statements, often repeating unverified claims such as “e-cigarettes are 95% safer than smoking.” Others exaggerated harms. For Hoffman, that underscores the need for nuance. “Whether it’s on social media or in direct conversations, public health has to stick to the facts, even if they’re more complicated.”
Tripathi’s computational topic modeling confirmed those themes while helping the team see broader patterns across the data. Pairing the methods, the researchers assert, strengthens both approaches, and points toward how social media can be systematically mined for insights into shifting health behaviors.
The JUUL story itself carries global resonance. Some commenters chimed in from the UK, where vaping is regulated as a harm reduction strategy, sparking debates that echo in research circles worldwide. “It’s a reminder that what we see in the U.S. isn’t universal,” Hoffman noted.
For both scholars, the study demonstrates the potential of social media research to enrich public health understanding. Anonymous comments on a YouTube video might seem fleeting. But together, they sketch a vivid picture of how people perceive risk and respond to media.
“It’s the modern equivalent of finding old pamphlets in an archive,” said Hoffman. “Years from now, these digital traces may be the letters future historians look back on.”
Study co-authors include Jaime Sidani, PhD, BCHS associate professor, Arial Shensa, PhD, assistant professor of health administration and public health, Duquesne University, Julia (Pengyue) Dou, BCHS PhD candidate, and Pitt undergraduate students Piper Narendorf, David C. Frederick Honors College, and Nishi Hundi, School of Public Health.
-Clare Collins