Tweeting about public health policy: Social media response to the UK Government’s announcement of a Parliamentary vote on draft standardised packaging regulations

Jenny L Hatchard, Joao Quariguasi Frota Neto, Christos Vasilakis and Karen A Evans-Reeves

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-16

Abstract: Background: Standardised tobacco packaging has been, and remains, a contentious policy globally, attracting corporate, public health, political, media and popular attention. In January 2015, the UK Government announced it would vote on draft regulations for the policy before the May 2015 General Election. We explored reactions to the announcement on Twitter, in comparison with an earlier period of little UK Government activity on standardised packaging. Methods: We obtained a random sample of 1038 tweets in two 4-week periods, before and after the UK Government’s announcement. Content analysis was used to examine the following Tweet characteristics: support for the policy, purpose, Twitter-user’s geographical location and affiliation, and evidence citation and quality. Chi-squared analyses were used to compare Tweet characteristics between the two periods. Results: Overall, significantly more sampled Tweets were in favour of the policy (49%) in comparison to those opposed (19%). Yet, at Time 2, following the announcement, a greater proportion of sampled tweets opposed standardised packaging compared to the period sampled at Time 1, prior to the announcement (p

Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0211758

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0211758

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