  Background: Twitter has become the "wild-west" of marketing and promotional
strategies for advertisement agencies. Electronic cigarettes have been heavily
marketed across Twitter feeds, offering discounts, "kid-friendly" flavors,
algorithmically generated false testimonials, and free samples. Methods:All
electronic cigarette keyword related tweets from a 10% sample of Twitter
spanning January 2012 through December 2014 (approximately 850,000 total
tweets) were identified and categorized as Automated or Organic by combining a
keyword classification and a machine trained Human Detection algorithm. A
sentiment analysis using Hedonometrics was performed on Organic tweets to
quantify the change in consumer sentiments over time. Commercialized tweets
were topically categorized with key phrasal pattern matching. Results:The
overwhelming majority (80%) of tweets were classified as automated or
promotional in nature. The majority of these tweets were coded as
commercialized (83.65% in 2013), up to 33% of which offered discounts or free
samples and appeared on over a billion twitter feeds as impressions. The
positivity of Organic (human) classified tweets has decreased over time (5.84
in 2013 to 5.77 in 2014) due to a relative increase in the negative words
ban,tobacco,doesn't,drug,against,poison,tax and a relative decrease in the
positive words like haha,good,cool. Automated tweets are more positive than
organic (6.17 versus 5.84) due to a relative increase in the marketing words
best,win,buy,sale,health,discount and a relative decrease in negative words
like bad, hate, stupid, don't. Conclusions:Due to the youth presence on Twitter
and the clinical uncertainty of the long term health complications of
electronic cigarette consumption, the protection of public health warrants
scrutiny and potential regulation of social media marketing.
