Vaping misinformation

At The Critic, I've written an article I've been meaning to write for a while about misinformation about vaping. A recent suggestion from someone in the basketcase of Australia that vapes have Polonium-210 in them inspired me to get it written.

A study published last year found that if you lie to people on Twitter, some of them will believe you. The researchers showed 2,400 smokers some tweets about vaping, most of which were categorically untrue, and found that those who were exposed to misinformation were more likely to have a poorer understanding of the risks of e-cigarettes than those who were exposed to accurate information.

So far, so unsurprising. What was remarkable was the level of ignorance displayed by nearly everyone, regardless of what tweets they were shown. Of the people who were told that vaping is as harmful or more harmful than smoking, only 29 per cent believed that e-cigarettes contain fewer toxins than cigarettes. This is a pitifully low figure, but even among the people who were told that vaping is “completely harmless”, the figure was only 43 per cent. (In case it is not obvious — and apparently it isn’t — e-cigarettes contain far fewer toxins than cigarettes.)

No matter what messages they were shown, more than 60 per cent of the participants wrongly believed that e-cigarettes contain tar and the vast majority of them believed that vaping causes “popcorn lung”. Even among those who were told that vaping is completely harmless, 88 per cent thought that e-cigarettes cause popcorn lung.

British smokers were less ignorant than Americans, but they were still deeply confused. At the start of the study, only 11 per cent of the British smokers correctly believed that vaping doesn’t cause popcorn lung (compared with a pitiful 6 per cent of American smokers) and only 46 per cent of them understood that e-cigarettes don’t contain tar (among the Americans it was just 27 per cent). They would have been better off getting their opinions from a coin toss.

 

Do read the rest.