Advertisements and messages about tobacco products shared on social media have a major impact. People who see them are twice as likely to use tobacco products. That’s according to a large meta-analysis from the Keck School of Medicine’s Department of Population and Public Health Sciences published in JAMA Pediatrics. “Teens could be educated on why the tobacco industry is targeting them.”
By the web editor
It has long been believed that social media, due to its global reach, can circumvent local advertising bans. Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest and Tumbler all contain posts, photos and videos of people smoking or vaping, tobacco advertisements and sponsored content from tobacco and e-cigarette manufacturers. Reported earlier this year TabakNee for example, that there was a rapid increase in advertising for shisha pens on social media, that young people were purchasing banned snus there and the content had encouraged American young people to smoke. Last weekend the English newspaper revealed The Observer how the Chinese e-cigarette manufacturer Elf Bar floutes British advertising bans and pays influencers to promote disposable e-cigarettes to children and young people on TikTok.
“The rapid increase in social media has given tobacco companies a new way to market their products, especially among teens and young people,” said Jon-Patrick Allem of the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at Keck School of Medicine in a press release. He is one of the authors of a new study investigating the influence of social media tobacco advertising on later tobacco use.
The first major meta-analysis
The study is published in JAMA Pediatrics and is the first major meta-analysis of data from 139,624 participants from 29 other studies. “We cast a huge net on the tobacco and social media literature and filtered out everything that deals with the relationship between social media content and tobacco use,” study lead author Scott Donaldson said in the press release. These are participants from the United States, India, Australia and Indonesia. 72 percent of the participants were adolescents, 15 percent were young adults and 13 percent were adults.
Twice as likely to smoke
The researchers conclude that online tobacco content on social media influences the offline tobacco use of those who have seen that content. People who had seen the content were twice as likely to use tobacco products later in life. “It’s especially important to know that people who have never used tobacco before are sensitive to tobacco advertising,” Allem says. “That suggests that exposure to tobacco-related content could spark interest and potentially persuade non-smokers to take up tobacco.”
Call for policymakers to intervene
The researchers state that their research is important for policy makers. “First of all, action could be taken to counteract the influence of pro-tobacco content,” Allem says. “Teenagers could be educated on why the tobacco industry is targeting them.” Policymakers could also introduce stricter social media advertising rules. In addition, social media itself could be mobilized to protect its users from tobacco content, for example by adding warning labels to messages about tobacco.
More than 1 million views of Sick of Smoking on TikTok
In the Netherlands, lung specialist Wanda de Kanter has already outrun the troops by entering into a collaboration with video platform TikTok on behalf of Sick of Smoking last August. She warns young people there about the tobacco industry’s goal: to purposely make them addicted to nicotine at an early age. The Sick of Smoking channel’s TikTok videos have been viewed more than a million times.
tags: health warnings | tobacco advertising | TikTok | young people | surreptitious advertising | research | social media | public health | Sick of Smoking