Effects of Online Comments On Smokers' Perception of Anti-Smoking Public Service Announcements

Background:  This project is one of our steps to explore online recommendation system and its social impact. We are no longer in a world where information only flows one-way from media to audience. Nowadays audience is information producer, and they contribute to the message production process.

Program background:  On YouTube anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) are widely viewed and uploaded; they also receive extensive commentary by viewers. Viewers of these health messages are also exposed to the comments accompanying them. This study examined whether such evaluative comments influence evaluations when viewed subsequently by others. 

Evaluation Methods and Results:  A representative sample of 592 current smokers from the U.S. was recruited.  Subjects were randomly assigned to watch anti-smoking PSA with positive comments, negative comments, mixed comments or no comments.To avoid case-category confound a pool of 292 comments were collected. Every subject received a unique set of ten comments randomly selected from the pool for each PSA based on his/her comment valence condition.  PSA quality was a within-subject factor so every subject watched two PSAs, one strong and one weak, in random order. Strong and weak PSAs were selected from a pool of 99 previously rated anti-smoking PSAs.  Strong PSAs were those rated as top ten in perceived effectiveness by adult smokers; weak PSAs were those rated in the bottom ten. Results showed that PSAs with positive comments were perceived by smokers as more effective than PSAs with negative comments. However, subjects in the no-comment condition rated the PSAs more highly than subjects in any of the comment conditions. Moreover, in both positive and negative conditions subjects who read all the comments perceived the PSA as less effective than those who read a few or some comments. It was also found that strong PSAs remained strong and weak ones remained weak regardless of the kind of comments following them.  However, the simple presence of comments influenced strong PSAs more than weak PSAs. For strong PSAs the perceived effectiveness of the no comment condition is significantly higher than any of the other three comment conditions, but for weak PSAs only negative comments generated a significantly lower perceived effectiveness score than the no comment condition. Smokers’ prior readiness to quit smoking was found to moderate the effect of comments on their perception of the PSAs. Smokers at the lowest stage of change scale considered the PSAs ineffective no matter what comments they saw. For smokers in the middle or at the top of the stage of change scale, however, positive comments made PSA more effective compared with negative comments.

Conclusions:  Anti-smoking PSAs would be better off without comments.

Implications for research and/or practice:  When we are excited about the social media and the interactivity internet allows, we also need to raise some caution. Interactivity is a double edged sword. Sometimes it helps us to send health messages out to more people but some other times it can overwhelm the health message and erase its efficacy.