Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

156. Youth Appeal In Recreational Marijuana Promotions Across Three Social Media Platforms

2019; Elsevier BV; Volume: 64; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.10.172

1879-1972

Marina Christine Jenkins, Bradley Kerr, Joshua B. Scheck, Aubrey D. Gower, Megan A. Moreno,

Privacy, Security, and Data Protection

Since recreational marijuana use was legalized in Washington State in 2012, marijuana businesses have used social media as a main form of advertising. There are concerns that this social media presence may lead to significant exposure and influence on underage viewers. The social media content posted by marijuana business remains underexplored. The purpose of this study was to evaluate content on three social media platforms towards understanding the presence of content appealing to youth. This study evaluated 3 marijuana businesses in Washington State on the social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (9 total public pages). For each business, we coded every post over one month. Our evaluation focused on: 1) whether the page had age restrictions to limit underage viewers, 2) user engagement, including likes and comments, and 3) measures of youth appeal. We applied coding based on a pilot study to evaluate content appealing to youth, including images such as cartoons, sweets and images of youth. Analysis included descriptive statistics and independent sample t-tests to test differences in user engagement and presence of youth appeal across platforms. Our sample included 128 total posts. For age restrictions, only 3 of the 9 business pages had these restrictions, one from each business. No age restrictions were found on Twitter pages. Regarding user engagement, the median number of likes on posts across all platforms was 4; Instagram had the highest median number of likes at 22. Posts with age restrictions were found to have significantly more likes than those without, p=.021. The median number of comments on all platforms was 0. The highest average number of comments was on Twitter at 4.5(SD=21.6). Posts with age restrictions did not differ significantly in number of comments from posts without age restrictions, p=.242. Youth appeal posts were present on 6.3% (n=8) of posts across all platforms: 2 posts (1.6%) referenced sweets, 2 posts (1.6%) were categorized as images of youth. Out of the 3 businesses evaluated, 2 had content categorized into at least one youth appeal category on each page, while the third business had none. Posts categorized as sweets were only present on Instagram, while posts categorized as images appealing to youth or images of youth were only present on Facebook and Twitter. An example of an image categorized as appealing to youth included a post in meme format captioned “When you high af & a song with police sirens come on” with a picture of Kermit the Frog. In this study of marijuana business presence on 3 social media platforms, few pages had age restrictions. Age restrictions were positively associated with likes and had no effect on comments, showing that user engagement does not suffer as a result of meeting regulations. We found that content appealing to youth was rare, but present in marijuana promotions on all social media platforms, including pages without age restrictions. These findings emphasize the need for greater enforcement of marijuana advertising policy as a means of prevention for youth.