Thresholds of Peer Pressure and the TikTok Epidemic – How is vaping spreading among the youth?
According to a study done by the CDC and the FDA in 2020, approximately one in five high school students and one in 20 middle school students currently used e-cigarettes (1). To counteract the use of vape and e-cigarettes among the youth, many initiatives have been launched such as the “Real Cost” and the “Safer =/= Safe” campaigns in 2018 (2). Despite the efforts of educating the youth about the dangers of e-cigarettes, vapes such as the JUUL and Puffbars are still highly used and shared among teenagers in social situations. Why do underage people still want to smoke, and go out of their way to illegally buy e-cigarettes even though the harms are widely known? In this blog post, I will explore the effects of peer pressure through an analysis of the diffusion effects on a social network, along with the influence of high-following individuals on social media platforms like TikTok in the ‘epidemic-like’ spread of vaping.
The prominence of the spread of vaping through high school, middle school, and college can be explained through the theory of diffusion in social networks. Because of the closeness, friend groups can be considered as dense clusters and a school can be made up of a lot of clusters. How probable will I start vaping if several of my friends vape? We can analyze the influence of peer pressure on starting to vape through methods of diffusion in social networks. Suppose that each friend group has a threshold value of q = ½, meaning that a person will start vaping if at least ½ of their friends are doing it. Therefore, I will start vaping if [ pdx >= (1-p)dx ], where p = number of friends that vape and d = the number of friends I have. ⅗ of my friends in my friend group vape, which is higher than the threshold of q = 1/2 . Therefore since p >= q it is likely that vaping will cascade throughout my friend group. Although dense clusters are obstacles of adoption, vaping can still spread throughout non-vaping friend groups if p <= (1-q). Initial adopters of vaping can also emerge randomly in certain friend groups because of influences through social media platforms and the urge to follow celebrity idols.
Deciding to vape because your friends vape is one thing, but what are the chances you start vaping because your Tik Tok idol does? After learning about epidemics in class, I see similarities between the spread of vaping and the spread of a disease. With the prominence of vaping throughout social media problems such as Tik Tok, many impressionable children (especially preteens and middle schoolers) are likely to question if they should engage in the behavior of vaping. For example,16 year old TikTok sensation, Charli D’amelio, had a video of her vaping surface online and go viral with over 63,000 views earlier this year (4). Many argued that because of Charli’s role as an influencer, and a role model to many young fans (103M followers), she is telling her fans that it is okay to vape. Let’s analyze Charli’s leaked video of her vaping as a model of the mechanism of contagion through the network of TikTok’s youth.
We can treat the spread of Charli’s vaping video as a branching process model, where each node has k neighbors in the next wave and each infected node passes contagion to k neighbors in the next wave. Instead of an infection, we can treat p as the probability of someone sharing Charli’s vape video and k as the amount of people the video is shared with. P, or the probability a person decides to spread the viral video is hard to determine in this scenario because it is based on a human’s individual choice. Therefore, we can say that there is a random chance of a person spreading the video or not. The 1st parameter, or “patient zero” would be the person who took the video of Charli vaping and sent it to their k friends. Next, each of the k friends would be the 2nd wave would have a probability p of spreading the video to their friends or not. Those people who spread the video would spread it to the 3rd wave of their friends and the cycle continues until the video spreads forever, or dies out. Viral videos like this one happens because one patient zero (the first person to send a video) can create many mini epidemics, and the bigger the following a person who spreads it has, the more “contagious” the spread of the video is. The larger the k, or the more followers a person who posts a video has, the more people are able to see the video and decide whether or not to continue sharing the video. Besides respecting someone’s privacy and not sharing a viral video, the spread of the influence of Chali’s vaping video can be reduced by platforms deleting the video off user’s pages so it no longer can be spread (reducing p). If the video is no longer there, the epidemic will die out in theory. It is assumed that the more young, impressionable individuals view the viral video, the more likely they will want to adopt vaping because they see Charli doing it. Thus, the more initial adopters in friend groups that can cause further cascades to spread.
Although it’s hard to determine someone’s tolerance to peer pressure and celebrity influence to vape, it makes sense that the more you are exposed to vaping, the more likely you are to start. Everyone’s personality is different and although the analysis of diffusion effects on network structure and epidemics show that it is very probable that I personally would start vaping, my strong-will against peer pressure, dislike of toxic chemicals in my body, and fear of lung cancer will prevent me from starting.
- https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937e1.htm
- https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/Quick-Facts-on-the-Risks-of-E-cigarettes-for-Kids-Teens-and-Young-Adults.html
- https://www.news-medical.net/news/20191001/Peer-pressure-at-school-influencing-teen-vape-use.aspx
- https://www.ibtimes.com/tiktok-sensation-charli-damelios-vaping-video-goes-viral-fans-give-mixed-reaction-3034263