This study addresses concerns surrounding the inadvertent promotion of tobacco-related products on TikTok by introducing an efficient deep learning-based video analysis system. Our approach focuses on categorizing TikTok videos based on tobacco-related cues, including content related to e-cigarettes, vapes, cigarettes, various tobacco flavors, and accessories that may bypass tobacco control policies. The proposed two-stage process begins with the extraction of essential cues using speech-to-text, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and video classification techniques. This initial phase comprehensively captures textual and visual information associated with tobacco products, forming the foundation for understanding video content. Subsequently, in the second stage, the extracted cues are integrated into a vision-language model alongside the input video. This stage trains the model to analyze contextual nuances, achieving a detailed understanding of the nuanced elements associated with tobacco promotion on TikTok. The system classifies input videos into predefined classes (cigarette, e-cigarette/vapes, pouches, or others) and provides detailed analyses. This capability enables a granular examination of diverse tobacco-related content on TikTok, proving valuable for regulatory agencies like the FDA in quickly identifying potential illegal promotion and sales of non-compliant tobacco products and accessories.

The Public Health Advocacy Dataset (PHAD) is a comprehensive collection of 5730 videos related to tobacco products sourced from social media platforms TikTok and YouTube. This dataset encompasses 4.3 million frames and includes detailed metadata such as user engagement metrics, video descriptions, and search keywords. These features provide a valuable resource for analyzing tobacco-related content and its impact. Our research employs a two-stage classification approach, incorporating a Vision-Language (VL) Encoder, demonstrating superior performance in accurately categorizing various types of tobacco products and usage scenarios. The analysis reveals significant user engagement trends, particularly with vaping and e-cigarette content, highlighting areas for targeted public health interventions. The PHAD addresses the need for multi-modal data in public health research, offering insights that can inform regulatory policies and public health strategies. This dataset is a crucial step towards understanding and mitigating the impact of tobacco usage, ensuring that public health efforts are more inclusive and effective.

The proliferation of tobacco-related content on social media platforms poses significant challenges for public health monitoring and intervention. This paper introduces a novel multi-modal deep learning framework named Flow-Attention Adaptive Semantic Hierarchical Fusion (FLAASH) designed to analyze tobacco-related video content comprehensively. FLAASH addresses the complexities of integrating visual and textual information in short-form videos by leveraging a hierarchical fusion mechanism inspired by flow network theory. Our approach incorporates three key innovations, including a flow-attention mechanism that captures nuanced interactions between visual and textual modalities, an adaptive weighting scheme that balances the contribution of different hierarchical levels, and a gating mechanism that selectively emphasizes relevant features. This multi-faceted approach enables FLAASH to effectively process and analyze diverse tobacco-related content, from product showcases to usage scenarios. We evaluate FLAASH on the Multimodal Tobacco Content Analysis Dataset (MTCAD), a large-scale collection of tobacco-related videos from popular social media platforms. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over existing methods, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in classification accuracy, F1 score, and temporal consistency. The proposed method also shows strong generalization capabilities when tested on standard video question-answering datasets, surpassing current models. This work contributes to the intersection of public health and artificial intelligence, offering an effective tool for analyzing tobacco promotion in digital media.