When tobacco is headline news: how public health bodies and anti-regulatory issue publics exercise influence in breaking news events

While social media allow practitioners to talk directly to audiences, their unstructured nature often advantages opposition actors not tied to bureaucratic structures. Simultaneously, traditional methods of information dissemination via the mass media continue to exist. Using a large dataset of tweets (N = 62.400) collected during a breaking news public health event (the JUUL Marketing Denial Order), this paper examines the discursive power (Jungherr et al. [2019]. Discursive power in contemporary media systems: A comparative framework. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 24(4), 404–425. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161219841543) of public health bodies and opposition actors to frame the event. Results show while ‘corruption’, ‘misplaced priorities’ and ‘harm reduction’ were the most used frames, many accounts using these frames had little reach. Instead, the least used frame – ‘youth protection’ – had the greatest reach due to use by legacy mass media accounts who were by far the most followed accounts. This work suggests practitioners should engage legacy mass media to share public health messaging and researchers should consider the reach of social media messages and not just the number of posts to understand influence.