Reframing social media discourse following the FDA's menthol ban announcement as industry agenda setting rather than public sentiment

Background: The tobacco industry has spent millions of dollars promoting racialised narratives against the US Food and Drug Administration's recently announced ban on menthol as a characterising cigarette flavour. This research investigates racialised narratives in online discourse following the ban's announcement.

Methods: Tweets and users responding to the April 2022 menthol ban announcement were content analysed to examine the influence of tobacco industry affiliates and potentially organic African-American/Black (AA/B) users. Next we investigated the extent to which the menthol ban was discussed on AA/B subreddits and used Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling to provide an overview of the menthol ban discussion on Reddit.

Results: Only 28 (13.9%) tweets by 22 users claimed that the menthol ban would lead to police violence and/or racial discrimination. Of users who tweeted about over-policing, eight (36.4%) had financial connections to the tobacco industry. There were only three tweets receiving a combined seven retweets from potentially organic AA/B users. On Reddit, only two posts with one comment discussed the menthol ban on subreddits dedicated to AA/B issues and culture. Topic modelling showed that the most common topic related to the menthol ban involved the social and political implications of the ban followed by illicit markets and protecting youth.

Conclusion: Tweets claiming a menthol ban will lead to police violence are indicative of industry agenda-setting. The menthol ban was not a prominent topic of discussion in AA/B subreddits although users discussing news and politics expressed concern for how AA/B people would respond to a ban politically.