Potential Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Public Perception of Water Pipes on Reddit: Observational Study

Abstract

Background: Socializing is one of the main motivations for water pipe smoking. Restrictions on social gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic might have influenced water pipe smokers' behaviors. As one of the most popular social media platforms, Reddit has been used to study public opinions and user experiences. Objective: In this study, we aimed to examine the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on public perception and discussion of water pipe tobacco smoking using Reddit data. Methods: We collected Reddit posts between December 1, 2018, and June 30, 2021, from a Reddit archive (PushShift) using keywords such as "waterpipe,""hookah,"and "shisha."We examined the temporal trend in Reddit posts mentioning water pipes and different locations (such as homes and lounges or bars). The temporal trend was further tested using interrupted time series analysis. Sentiment analysis was performed to study the change in sentiment of water pipe-related posts before and during the pandemic. Topic modeling using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) was used to examine major topics discussed in water pipe-related posts before and during the pandemic. Results: A total of 45,765 nonpromotion water pipe-related Reddit posts were collected and used for data analysis. We found that the weekly number of Reddit posts mentioning water pipes significantly increased at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (P