Tracking e-cigarette warning label compliance on Instagram with deep learning
The U.S. Food Drug Administration (FDA) requires that e-cigarette advertisements include a prominent warning label that reminds consumers that nicotine is addictive. However, the high volume of vaping-related posts on social media makes compliance auditing expensive and time-consuming, suggesting that an automated, scalable method is needed. We sought to develop and evaluate a deep learning system designed to automatically determine if an Instagram post promotes vaping, and if so, if an FDA-compliant warning label was included or if a non-compliant warning label was visible in the image. We compiled and labeled a dataset of 4,363 Instagram images, of which 44 3 labels. Using a 20 variations: image processing backbone model (Inceptionv3, ResNet50, EfficientNet), data augmentation, progressive layer unfreezing, output bias initialization designed for class imbalance, and multitask learning. Our final model achieved an area under the curve (AUC) and [accuracy] of 0.97 [92 vaping classification, 0.99 [99 [97 can effectively identify vaping posts on Instagram and track compliance with FDA warning label requirements.
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