Examining How Oral Nicotine Pouches Are Trending on TikTok: A Qualitative Descriptive Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Oral nicotine pouches (ONPs) have become a popular alternative nicotine product in recent years, especially among youth. This is concerning given the substantial health risks associated with nicotine use at an early age. Social media channels that are popular among youth (eg, TikTok) are being used to promote ONPs. Understanding the ways that individuals communicate about ONPs on popular social media, like TikTok, is critical for informing public health efforts aimed at protecting youth from the harms of nicotine. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to explore how ONPs (specifically Zyns) are represented on TikTok. METHODS: Through a qualitative descriptive design, TikTok videos were collected and analyzed. A total of 250 TikTok videos were screened under the hashtags #zyn, #zyns, and #nicotinepouch, with 132 included for final analysis. Analysis was guided by the Braun and Clarke thematic analysis approach. Collaborative coding ensured reliability and supported the identification of key themes in the videos. RESULTS: The following five themes emerged: (1) the Zyn movement (58/132, 43.9%), which relays how ONPs have become a popular culture trend; (2) "boy heaven" (28/132, 21.2%), which showcases the dominance of male use; (3) unintended negative consequences (18/132, 13.6%), which reveals how negative side effects are downplayed; (4) product design: life does not need to stop (13/132, 9.8%), which highlights how ONPs enable nicotine consumption anywhere at any time; and (5) physical benefits: "It's like IcyHot for your mouth" (6/132, 4.5%), which brings forward positive sensory experiences with ONP use. Overall, the content heavily condoned ONP use and normalized it, with male individuals disproportionately represented as the primary users of ONPs. CONCLUSIONS: This study reveals TikTok's influence in shaping the perceptions of ONPs as trendy and relatively harmless, especially among youth. The findings highlight how these products can quickly become embedded in youth culture through popular social media channels. The findings also underscore the need for more restrictions on the content that is so readily available to youth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".