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Oral nicotine pouches are a new form of tobacco-free nicotine products launched in recent years with a variety of flavors.
This study aims to examine the public perceptions and discussions of oral nicotine pouches on Reddit, a popular social media platform for sharing user experiences.
Between February 15, 2019, and February 12, 2021, a total of 2410 Reddit posts related to oral nicotine pouches were obtained over a 2-year period. After the removal of unrelated or commercial posts, 653 Reddit posts related to oral nicotine pouches remained. Topics and sentiments related to oral nicotine pouches on Reddit were hand coded.
The number of Reddit posts related to oral nicotine pouches increased during the study period. Content analysis showed that the most popular topic was “sharing product information and user experience” (366/653, 56%), in which sharing oral nicotine pouch products and user experiences were dominant. The next popular topic was “asking product-related questions” (product properties and product recommendations; 115/653, 17.6%), followed by “quitting nicotine products” such as vaping or smoking through use of oral nicotine pouches or quitting the oral nicotine pouches themselves (83/653, 12.7%) and “discussing oral nicotine pouch–related health” symptoms or concerns related to oral nicotine pouches (74/653, 11.3%). The least popular topic was “legality and permissions” related to oral nicotine pouches (15/653, 2.3%). In addition, a greater number of Reddit posts described positive attitudes compared to negative attitudes toward oral nicotine pouches (354/653, 54.2% vs 101/653, 15.5%;
Reddit posts overall had a positive attitude toward oral nicotine pouches and users were actively sharing product and user experiences. Our study provides the first insight on up-to-date oral nicotine pouch discussions on social media.
Oral nicotine pouches are popular products launched by tobacco manufacturers over the past 3 years [
To date, several studies have investigated the chemical components of oral nicotine pouches. For example, a recent study examined the moisture content, pH, and nicotine content of 37 oral nicotine pouch brands [
The universality of social media makes it a suitable platform to collect information on public attitudes and perceptions of new emerging trends. Reddit is a popular social media outlet that is differentiated from other social media platforms by its capability for users to form niche groups called “subreddits.” Each subreddit has a common topic and users within the subreddit can express their opinions and personal experiences. According to
In this study, we aimed to examine the public perceptions of, and popular topics related to, oral nicotine pouches on Reddit during the past 2 years, when the sales of oral nicotine pouches significantly increased in the United States. First, to understand what is on market, we identified the brands and flavors of oral nicotine pouch products available online. Through manually coding Reddit posts for sentiments and topics, we examined public attitudes toward oral nicotine pouches and identified top topics related to oral nicotine pouches. Classifications of subtopics and analysis of sentiments within each topic were further conducted to obtain more details. The findings provide important information on this emerging nicotine product, which could be helpful for understanding perception, use, and future regulation of oral nicotine pouches.
Coders (YS and JZ) searched online stores in February 2021 to identify oral nicotine pouch products and brands on the market during the Reddit data collection period and to inform the hand coding of the Reddit posts. Information about available oral nicotine pouch products, including brand names, product names, and flavors, was collected from online stores like “nicokik.com” and “snusdirect.com.” The nicotine strengths, when available, were also included.
Reddit data between February 15, 2019, and February 12, 2021, were downloaded from Reddit Archive [
To achieve higher accuracy of hand coding and defining the topics, we adopted an inductive approach [
By examining the content of the 117 related and noncommercial posts, two authors (YS and JZ) individually grouped those with similar content and summarized them by a generalizable phrase such as “Sharing product information and user experience.” Within each general topic, we further summarized analogous posts by a more specific topic (subtopic) like “user experiences.” After hand coding 117 sampled posts separately, we compared and discussed our codebook definition from two individual coders, and the final decision on how to categorize topics was made by a group of 4 authors (YS, JZ, ZX, and DL) to form a unified classification standard. The initial codebook was used as the reference for the remaining 2060 posts, which were independently coded by 2 authors (YS and JZ). Any coding difference between the 2 coders was resolved through discussion among all 4 coders. Moreover, further modifications to the codebook were made in the process of hand coding the remaining 2060 posts with intensive discussions among the group of 4 coders. As a result, Reddit posts related to oral nicotine pouches were categorized into 5 topics: “sharing product information and user experience,” “asking oral nicotine pouch–related questions,” “quitting nicotine products,” “discussing oral nicotine pouch–related health,” and “legality/permissions” (
Topics and subtopics of Reddit posts on oral nicotine pouches.
Topics and subtopics | Description | |
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Products | Posts where users were sharing about specific oral nicotine pouch products. |
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User experiences | Posts where users were sharing the experience of how they were using oral nicotine pouches and how they felt about them when they were using the products. |
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Opinions | Posts where users were sharing subjective points of view about the products. |
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Information | Posts where users were sharing information that they obtained elsewhere. |
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Others | Posts about other things like sharing homemade oral nicotine product recipes. |
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Characteristics of oral nicotine pouches | Posts about the properties of oral nicotine pouches such as nicotine strength, flavors, and packaging. |
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Product recommendation | Posts that were asking for recommendations of oral nicotine pouch products. |
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Order or purchase information | Posts asking for information about the online and offline purchase of oral nicotine pouches. |
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Others | Posts asking uncommon questions, like asking for opinions about the future of the oral nicotine pouch market. |
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Using oral nicotine pouches to quit vaping | Posts by users who were discussing intentions to use, attempts to use, or successful use of certain oral nicotine pouch products to quit vaping |
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Using oral nicotine pouches to quit smoking | Posts by users who were discussing intentions to use, attempts to use, or successful use of certain oral nicotine pouch products to quit smoking |
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Quitting oral nicotine pouches | Users of the posts intended to, were attempting to, or have successfully quit oral nicotine pouches |
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Others | Posts that shared experience using oral nicotine pouches to quit other nicotine-related products like tobacco and nicotine itself |
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Health symptoms | Posts discussing having negative health symptoms after the consumption of oral nicotine pouches, like gum bleeding and sickness |
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Health concerns | Posts that expressed health concerns with oral nicotine pouches. Users of those posts expressed worries about the potential side effects of oral nicotine pouches, including the symptoms above and addiction to nicotine. |
Legality and permissions | Posts that were discussing the regulatory policies and legal issues related to oral nicotine pouches |
In addition to analyzing the major topics discussed in each post, we performed sentiment analysis with the standard “positive,” “neutral,” and “negative” categories [
All the posts were double-coded. By focusing on 653 related and noncommercial posts, we calculated the agreement rates between topics and sentiments to examine the overall accuracy of classifications. The raw agreement rate (number of agreed posts/total posts) is 86.23% (563/653) for topics and 82.20% (537/653) for sentiments. The Cohen κ is 0.7526 for topics and 0.7102 for sentiments.
The study has been reviewed and approved by the Office for Human Subject Protection Research Subjects Review Board (RSRB) at the University of Rochester (Study ID: STUDY00006570).
In total, coders (YS and JZ) identified 20 oral nicotine pouch brands and 30 different oral nicotine products available on online stores during the study period (
Longitudinal trend of Reddit posts related to oral nicotine pouches.
To understand the major topics discussed related to oral nicotine pouches on Reddit, we first divided posts into 5 general categories. Over half of the posts (366/653, 56%) were related to the topic “sharing product information and user experience.” The second most popular topic (115/653, 17.6%) was “asking oral nicotine pouch–related questions,” followed by “quitting nicotine products” (83/653, 12.7%) and “discussing oral nicotine pouch–related health” (74/653, 11.3%). Lastly, 2.3% (15/653) of posts reviewed the topic “legality and permissions.”
Among the 5 topics, 4 were further divided into subtopics. Under the topic “sharing product information and user experience,” users were more inclined to share “products” (140/366, 38.3%). Sharing “user experiences” accounted for the second-largest proportion (109/366, 29.8%), followed by sharing “opinions” (60/366, 18.6%). Sharing “information” and sharing “others” accounted for 10.7% (39/366) and 2.7% (10/366), respectively. For the topic “asking oral nicotine pouch–related questions,” almost half of the posts (57/115, 49.6%) were asking about “characteristics” of oral nicotine pouches. Approximately one-quarter (27/115, 23.5%) were asking for “recommendations.” Asking about “others” and asking for “order or purchase information” comprised 17.4% (20/115) and 9.6% (11/115), respectively. For the topic “quitting nicotine products,” over half of the discussions (42/83, 50.6%) were about “using oral nicotine pouches to quit vaping.” The remaining 3 subtopics were “using oral nicotine pouches to quit smoking” (15/83, 18.1%), quitting “others” (14/83, 16.9%), and “quitting oral nicotine pouches” (12/83, 14.5%). The fourth significant topic was “discussing oral nicotine pouch–related health.” When discussing health, the majority of posts (60/74, 81.1%) were talking about “health symptoms” related to oral nicotine pouches, and the rest talked about either “health concerns” (13/74, 17.6%) about oral nicotine pouches or “others” (1/74, 1.4%).
Sentiment analysis of the Reddit posts determined that over half of the posts (354/653, 54.2%) expressed positive attitudes toward oral nicotine pouches (
Sentiments toward oral nicotine pouches in Reddit posts.
Topic | Positive, n/N (%) | Neutral, n/N (%) | Negative, n/N (%) |
Sharing product information and user experience | 233/366 (63.7) | 99/366 (27) | 34/366 (9.3) |
Product-related questions | 48/115 (41.7) | 62/115 (53.9) | 5/115 (4.4) |
Quitting nicotine products | 57/83 (68.7) | 20/83 (24.1) | 6/83 (7.2) |
Discussing oral nicotine pouch–related health | 11/74 (14.9) | 9/74 (12.1) | 54/74 (73) |
Legality and permissions | 5/15 (33.3) | 8/15 (53.3) | 2/15 (13.4) |
This study explored user perceptions of oral nicotine pouches on Reddit by performing topic and sentiment analysis on 653 Reddit posts related to oral nicotine pouches collected over 2 years. We observed an overall increasing trend in the number of posts during the study period. Major topics about oral nicotine pouches include sharing preferred products, user experiences, or opinions of oral nicotine pouches; quitting oral nicotine pouches or using oral nicotine pouches to quit other tobacco products; and adverse health effects. Over half of the posts showed a positive attitude toward oral nicotine pouches. Although the majority of product information/user experience and quitting-related posts indicated positive sentiments similar to the overall sentiment, health-related posts contained the most significant proportion of negative posts.
It is interesting to note that the overall increase in the number of Reddit posts is consistent with the remarkable growth trend of sales of oral nicotine pouches during a similar time period. Compared to the sales of total other tobacco products in convenience stores in the United States for the 24 weeks ending on May 30 in 2020, which had a growth of 7%, sales of oral nicotine pouches grew a staggering 498% [
Several factors could be responsible for the large proportion of posts discussing topics related to product information/user experience information of oral nicotine pouches. One factor could be that oral nicotine pouches are novel products, generating curiosity. Another factor could be the large variety of oral nicotine pouches brands and flavors, which further engenders curiosity, interest, and willingness to share their preferences and user experiences with others. Moreover, compared to other social media platforms like Instagram or Twitter, Reddit has a particular feature called a “subreddit,” where all users in the same subreddit are interested in the same topic and are only allowed to discuss related subjects [
In this study, the overall sentiment toward oral nicotine pouches was positive, and most quitting-related posts were positive as well, which is consistent with Andersson and Lundqvist’s [
Given the relatively short amount of time that oral nicotine pouch products have been on the market, the short- and long-term health effects of oral nicotine pouches use are still unknown and need further investigation. Our investigation of Reddit posts related to oral nicotine pouches identified some health symptoms mentioned by the users such as gum problems, which provided indications of what users may be experiencing and of potential health harms to be investigated. The effects of oral nicotine products on periodontal health and the upper airway of the lung are not known. There is a possibly that these products will cause oral submucous fibrosis [
The generalizability of these results is subject to several limitations. First, the paucity of noncommercial posts limited the scope of this study. Due to the fact that oral nicotine pouches are emerging new tobacco products, only 653 posts were included in our analysis during our study period from February 15, 2019, to February 12, 2021.
Thus far, there have been limited analyses of social media data on oral nicotine pouches. Our research provides a first and up-to-date insight into the current public perception and popular topics regarding oral nicotine pouches discussed on Reddit. Although this is a start, further research is needed due to the substantial growth of the oral nicotine pouch market. Our study only discusses the broad health symptoms mentioned in the Reddit posts. Whether those health symptoms are related to use of oral nicotine pouches and the health effects of oral nicotine pouches need to be investigated in future human studies.
Our research provides a first insight into the current public perceptions on Reddit about oral nicotine pouches, which provide valuable information for regulators and policy makers. The trending topics summarized in our study were reflections of what the public was interested in regarding oral nicotine pouches. Our results only provided very preliminary information about the potential health effects related to oral nicotine pouches. Future studies are warranted to evaluate the health effects of oral nicotine pouches for regulation purposes.
Flowchart of data collection and preprocessing.
Example Reddit posts in each topic and subtopic category with different sentiments.
Online collection of oral nicotine pouch brands, products, and flavors.
Food and Drug Administration
This study was supported by the WNY Center for Research on Flavored Tobacco Products (CRoFT) under cooperative agreement U54CA228110 from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health and the US Food and Drug Administration.
Data are available upon reasonable request.
ZX, RGM, and DL conceived and designed the study. YS, JZ, ZX, and DL analyzed the data. YS, JZ, ZX, RGM, and DL wrote the manuscript. DJO, IR, and SM edited the manuscript. All authors edited and approved the final version of the manuscript.
None declared.