Marya Yenita Sitohang
Pusat Riset Kependudukan BRIN
mary006@brin.go.id
Background
The use and availability of social media have grown exponentially, providing new opportunities to support smoking cessation efforts. Social media encompasses various interactive web and mobile platforms, enabling individuals and communities to exchange information, ideas, photos, or videos within a virtual network. This study aims to identify discourses related to smoking cessation encouragement among Indonesian people in social media.
Method
To collect data on social media, particularly Twitter, the researchers used Netlytic as a tool and limited the keyword to “rokok” in the Indonesian language. Twitter was chosen due to its word-based communication, which allows users to share their opinions and thoughts. Content analysis was used to analyse collected tweets and identify themes related to smoking.
Results
The study found that discourse around smoking can either support smoking cessation intervention, normalise smoking and cigarettes, which may not support cessation efforts, or be neutral. Themes that support smoking cessation efforts include sharing experiences as a second-hand smoker either in a home or public space environment, discomfort with a smoking partner, family members’ sickness due to smoking, reporting health disadvantages of vaping, and using humour to encourage quitting smoking. On the other hand, smoking was normalised, and its devastating health effects were neglected since people saw smoking as a “teman ngopi” and casually discussed which cigarettes were better than others. Some discussions around smoking were not related to smoking cessation, such as discussion about cigarettes worker in May Day.
Conclusions
Social media can either reinforce smoking cessation or normalise smoking behaviour among Indonesian youth. Smoking cessation campaigns on social media can use relevant threads on Twitter to make them more grounded and relatable to encourage smoking cessation.
Keywords
discourses, smoking, twitter, Indonesian youth.