Understanding the spread of prevention and cessation messages on social media for substance use in youth

Purpose: Engagement is a critical metric to the effectiveness of online health messages. This paper explores how people engage in youth-generated prevention messages in social media. Design/methodology/approach: The data sample consisted of engagement measures of 82 youth-generated messages hosted in a social media channel and a follow-up survey on content creators' motivation for promoting their messages and their dissemination strategies. A comparative analysis of engagement metrics along with qualitative analysis of the message types was performed. Findings: Two types of messages were considered: stop messages and prevent messages. Our analyses found that people interacted with stop messages on social media more frequently than prevent messages. On analyzing the youth's motivation and promotion strategies, no significant difference was observed between stop message creators and prevent message creators. Social implications: This work has implications for programs promoting prevention and health information in social media. Originality/value: This is the first study in social media-based prevention programs the authors are aware of that differentiated between the strategies of youth-produced prevention messages.