Tobacco promotion restriction policies on social media

Grace Kong; Linnea Laestadius; Julia Vassey; Anuja Majmundar; Andrea M Stroup; Helen I Meissner; Ziyad Ben Taleb; Tess Boley Cruz; Sherry L Emery; Dan Romer

doi:10.1136/tc-2022-057348

Tobacco promotion restriction policies on social media

Tob Control. 2024 Apr 19;33(3):398-403. doi: 10.1136/tc-2022-057348.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, USA grace.kong@yale.edu.
² Zilber School of Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.
³ Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA.
⁴ Tobacco Control Research, American Cancer Society, Inc, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
⁵ Westat, Rockville, Maryland, USA.
⁶ Office of Disease Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
⁷ Department of Kinesiology, College of Nursing and Health Innovation, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas, USA.
⁸ Social Data Collaboratory, NORC at the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
⁹ Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

Abstract

Tobacco promotion is prolific on social media, with each platform setting their own restrictions on tobacco promotion and sales. We evaluated the policies related to tobacco product promotion and sales on 11 sites that are popular with youth in May 2021: Discord, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Tumblr, Twitch, Twitter and YouTube. Nine of the 11 sites prohibited paid advertising for tobacco products. However, only three of them clearly prohibited sponsored content (ie, social influencers) that promotes tobacco. Six platforms restricted content that sells tobacco products and three tried to prohibit underage access to content that promotes or sells tobacco products. Although most platform policies prohibited paid tobacco advertising, few addressed more novel strategies, such as sponsored/influencer content and few had age-gating to prevent youth access. There is a pressing need to regulate tobacco promotion on social media platforms.

Keywords: Media; Public policy; Social marketing.

Publication types

Editorial

MeSH terms

Adolescent
Advertising
Commerce
Humans
Marketing
Nicotiana
Policy
Social Media*
Tobacco Products*

Abstract

Publication types

MeSH terms

Grants and funding