The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Communication Research, was led by Jessica Fitts Willoughby, a professor in WSU’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, with co-author Stacey J.T. Hust, also a professor in the Murrow College. The researchers designed an online experiment involving 747 college students in Washington State who were shown real cannabis advertisements that had been posted on Instagram. Rather than relying on participants’ recollections of advertising they had encountered in the past, an approach common in earlier cannabis marketing research, the team presented specific, verifiable ads and then measured how each viewer interpreted them. This design allowed the investigators to examine how different people extracted different meanings from the same message and whether those individual interpretations were connected to their expectations about cannabis and their stated intentions to use it before sex.

The advertisements themselves spanned a range of visual themes. Some featured sexual or romantic imagery, including people using cannabis in bed and couples in intimate settings, while others depicted recreational scenes such as friends gathered around a bonfire. After viewing the ads, participants were asked a series of questions: what messages they took from each advertisement, what they expected from using cannabis before sex, and whether they intended to do so. This structure gave the researchers a way to separate exposure from interpretation, two things that earlier studies had often conflated by simply asking people how much cannabis advertising they remembered seeing.

The central finding of the experiment is that interpretation, not mere exposure, appears to be the key variable. Simply seeing a sexual or romantic advertisement did not consistently predict how viewers answered the researchers’ questions. What mattered was what viewers believed the ad was telling them. Students who interpreted an advertisement as suggesting that cannabis use results in better sex were more likely to expect those benefits for themselves, including the expectation that cannabis could improve their sexual experiences or reduce nervousness, and they were also more likely to say they might use cannabis before sex. Crucially, this pattern held whether or not the ad itself featured explicit sexual themes, indicating that the perceived promise of sexual benefit could be read into recreational imagery as well.

Willoughby framed the distinction between exposure and interpretation as central to the study’s contribution. “It wasn’t as simple as seeing a message and automatically being influenced by it,” she said. “The stronger connection appeared when someone interpreted the ad as saying cannabis makes sex better and then they thought it might do the same for them.” In other words, the persuasive pathway ran through the viewer’s own reading of the ad’s implied claim, a mechanism consistent with what researchers have long observed in alcohol advertising, where sexualized appeals can shape how people understand the information being presented. “We know from alcohol advertising that sexualized appeals can make a difference in how people understand the information presented,” Willoughby noted, adding that cannabis is different because “there really aren’t rules saying you can’t tie it to sex.”

The experiment also uncovered meaningful gender differences in how the ads operated. Men who wanted to be like the men depicted in the sexual or romantic advertisements, figures who were typically portrayed as physically fit, attractive, and masculine, were more likely to say they intended to use cannabis before sex. This suggests that for some male viewers, the ads may function through a form of social modeling, in which the depicted consumer becomes an aspirational figure whose behavior the viewer imagines adopting. Women responded to a different dimension of the same messages: those who thought the ads raised concerns about sexual consent were less likely to say they would use cannabis before sex. The same advertising content, in other words, could activate aspirational identification in one group and risk awareness in another, depending on how the viewer processed it.

That divergence carries practical weight for public health communication. Because consent emerged as a lever that shifted women’s stated intentions, health officials seeking to discourage cannabis use before sex may have a concrete messaging strategy available to them. “If health communicators want to address cannabis use before sex, they could create messages that clearly explain how it may affect decision making or consent,” Hust said. “Our findings suggest that those messages could make people, particularly women, less likely to intend to use cannabis before sex.” The finding is notable because it points to a specific, testable content strategy: rather than generic warnings, messages that directly address how cannabis may affect judgment and the capacity to give or recognize consent may resonate with the segment of the audience most responsive to that concern.

The policy implications extend beyond health messaging into the question of how cannabis advertising should be governed. Washington State prohibits cannabis ads aimed at people younger than 21, but the state’s rules do not specifically bar companies from suggesting that cannabis can improve sex or romantic experiences. At the national level, the cannabis industry has no voluntary code comparable to the distilled spirits industry’s guidelines, which have prohibited claims linking alcohol to sexual success since at least the mid-1990s. This asymmetry means that a claim considered off-limits in alcohol marketing for nearly three decades remains an open creative option for cannabis brands advertising on platforms such as Instagram, where young adults, including college students, form a substantial share of the audience.

Hust argues that the study’s results speak directly to that regulatory debate. “The larger question is whether cannabis advertisements should be regulated more like those for other adult-use products, such as alcohol,” she said. “Our findings show that when people interpret these ads as promising positive sexual experiences, that can shape what they expect from cannabis and whether they intend to use it.” The experimental evidence provides a mechanism for that argument: if the persuasive effect depends on viewers reading a sexual-benefit claim into an ad, then rules that restrict such claims, as the alcohol industry’s code does, would target precisely the interpretations the study linked to intentions to use cannabis before sex.

The research arrives at a moment when cannabis legalization has expanded the advertising landscape faster than the norms and rules that govern it. By showing that the same Instagram ads can produce different effects depending on whether viewers see a promise of better sex or a warning about consent, the WSU team has given both regulators and health communicators a more precise picture of how cannabis marketing may influence sexual decision making among young adults. The study, titled “Sex, Romance, or Recreation? An Experiment Testing the Effects of Cannabis Brand-generated Social Media Ads on College Students’ Expectancies and Intentions to Use Cannabis Prior to Sex,” was published in Communication Research on 31 August 2026, and its authors suggest the findings could ultimately help shape both public health messages and advertising policies in what remains a largely unregulated area of marketing.

Subject of Research: An experimental study of how cannabis social media advertising shapes college students' sexual expectancies and intentions to use cannabis before sex.

Article Title: Cannabis ads may shape viewers’ expectations about cannabis and sex

Article References: Cannabis ads may shape viewers’ expectations about cannabis and sex. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: cannabis advertising, social media, sexual expectancies, consent, college students, Communication Research, Washington State University, public health, advertising policy, Instagram, alcohol industry guidelines, experiment

The study examined English-language newspaper sources from the United States and Europe up to December 31, 2024, assembling a final corpus of 43,027 articles, of which 9,684 came from the United States and 33,343 from Europe. The authors combined computational text analysis with interpretive examination of the corpus, a methodological pairing that allowed them to detect broad patterns of representation across a very large body of coverage while also reading individual articles closely for nuance. The scale of the dataset matters: with tens of thousands of articles spanning years of reporting, recurring patterns of framing and sourcing become statistically visible in ways that smaller samples cannot reveal.

What emerged from the analysis is what the researchers describe as a striking hierarchy of visibility and authority. Massimo Ragnedda, professor of media and communication at the University of Sharjah and the study’s senior author, said the findings reveal that the United States is predominantly positioned as a technological innovator and leader, while Europe is cast as a regulator and normative evaluator. In this symbolic geography, America supplies the vision of the AI future and Europe supplies the moral and legal guardrails, a division of narrative labor that mirrors but also reinforces real-world concentrations of technological and institutional power.

China’s position in the coverage is more complicated and more ambivalent. Although Beijing is a leading AI power alongside the United States, the authors found that it appears as a hyper-visible but ambivalent rival, associated in the reporting with surveillance, geopolitical competition, and strategic threat. In other words, China is never ignored—its AI ambitions receive enormous attention—but that attention is filtered through frames of suspicion and rivalry rather than through the celebratory innovation narratives routinely applied to American firms and researchers. Visibility, the study suggests, is not the same as favorable representation.

Most striking of all is who is missing. Countries in Africa and Latin America are largely absent from the narrative or positioned primarily as sites of implementation, risk, or developmental need. They appear, when they appear at all, not as authors of technological futures but as territories where other people’s technologies are deployed, where risks materialize, or where development gaps must be closed. The result is a global AI story told almost entirely from a narrow band of the English-speaking world, in which the majority of humanity figures as a backdrop rather than as a protagonist.

The researchers conceptualize this pattern as discursive stratification, a term meant to capture an unequal distribution of narrative authority in which some actors are repeatedly positioned as legitimate authors and interpreters of technological futures, while others appear mainly as recipients, sites of implementation, or objects of technological change. The metaphor of stratification is deliberate: like geological layers, the media coverage sorts nations into tiers of narrative standing, with the top layers granted the authority to imagine and define what artificial intelligence will become, and the lower layers assigned passive or problematic roles in that unfolding story.

This framing draws on recent political-economy scholarship that views AI not simply as an unprecedented technological innovation with far-reaching consequences for human life, but as a sphere beset by rivalries over power distribution, geopolitical competition, and infrastructural concentration. The study extends that perspective into the realm of communication, treating AI as an inequality regime in which communicative power, visibility, value, and opportunity are redistributed through unequal linguistic structures of control. On this account, the struggle over AI is fought not only in laboratories, data centers, and regulatory agencies, but in the language used to describe the technology in the world’s most influential newspapers.

Central to the argument is a redefinition of what news does. The researchers conceptualize news not as a mirror of technological change, but as a narrative infrastructure—a discursive and institutional system through which AI becomes publicly legible and through which some actors are positioned as innovators, regulators, threats, or absences. Just as physical infrastructure such as undersea cables and semiconductor supply chains determines who can access and deploy the technology, this narrative infrastructure determines who can meaningfully participate in the public conversation about it. The stories repeatedly told about AI, the authors argue, help shape perceptions of who leads, who regulates, who threatens, who benefits, and who remains largely unheard.

The implications extend well beyond media criticism. Ragnedda notes that AI does not simply determine what we talk about; it also helps determine who is recognized as having the authority to speak about the technology and whose futures are considered worth imagining. If the public understanding of artificial intelligence is filtered through a narrow set of voices, then policy debates, investment decisions, and regulatory frameworks built on that understanding risk inheriting the same blind spots. The absence of African and Latin American perspectives, for example, means that questions of digital colonialism, labor exploitation in data annotation, and unequal access to AI benefits may be systematically underexplored in the outlets that most shape elite opinion.

The authors are nonetheless optimistic about the study’s contribution to the field. They write that it advances communication scholarship beyond descriptive analyses of representation toward a structural account of narrative authority in global media systems, showing how framing, sourcing hierarchies, and thematic emphasis combine to produce the symbolic geography of AI. Ragnedda distills the stakes into a single question: the issue is not only who builds AI, but who gets to define what AI means, and whose voice is missing. As artificial intelligence continues to reshape economies, security doctrines, and daily life, the study suggests that paying attention to the chain of dominance and dependence embedded in everyday news coverage may be as important as worrying about the technology itself.

Subject of Research: Discursive stratification and narrative authority in Western English-language news coverage of artificial intelligence

Article Title: Though seen as a threat to humanity, AI reporting in the West reflects a clear chain of dominance and dependence

Article References: Though seen as a threat to humanity, AI reporting in the West reflects a clear chain of dominance and dependence. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: artificial intelligence, media narratives, discursive stratification, narrative authority, news media, United States, Europe, China, Global South, computational text analysis, communication research, geopolitical competition