11.11 Internet promotion

The global and largely under-regulated nature of the Internet has provided vast opportunities for the promotion and sale of tobacco. Young people in particular are at high risk of exposure due to the substantial amount of time they spend online.¹ Australian adolescents are spending three to four hours on screens per day,² and almost all Australian adults (99.7%) used at least one device to go online in 2025.³ Online content can be created and uploaded in one country and then viewed and shared in another and this cross-border digital media consumption provides a myriad of ways through which the tobacco industry has been able to circumvent national TAPS bans.⁴

One of the first studies (US data from 2004) tracking online exposure to tobacco content showed that adolescents were consistently exposed on the Internet through their normal webpage viewing.⁵ Use by the tobacco industry of online interactivity and audience engagement tools has been documented since 2008. Early examples include:

• Thousands of people who smoked in the US helping to design a new pack for Camel cigarettes through an interactive website.⁶
• The cigarette rolling paper company Rizla hosting interactive and shareable games on its corporate website.⁷ The games are meant to reflect ‘the brand’s image as fun, interactive, individual, colourful and creative.’⁸

Since then, the rise of social media, along with the creation of a whole new marketing channel—the influencer—has fundamentally disrupted traditional advertising. The influencer will not only advertise products and lifestyles overtly, but covertly too, making deliberate tobacco promotion difficult to identify and monitor. A 2024 study found that 61% of young people within the study who had used social media in the past month had encountered tobacco-related content.⁹

The 2008 US National Cancer Institute (NCI) monograph on the role of the media in promoting and preventing tobacco use highlighted the lack of research in the area of internet-based tobacco advertising and promotion at the time.¹⁰ Since the NCI publication, a burgeoning field of research has examined how the Internet has been an ideal platform for tobacco companies to pursue their promotional ambitions at scale and to exploit the unprecedented opportunities that online digital media provide to marketers, such as the penetration of advertising into countries with even the highest WHO FCTC level of advertising bans.^1,11

In chapter six of the Report on the scientific basis of tobacco product regulation: ninth report of a WHO study group, the group categorise the following as forms of TAPS in online digital media:⁴

• Direct product promotion through paid advertisements

• Influencer promotions

• Commercial promotions of posts by consumers of their own tobacco use.

• Event promotion. i.e. Participants in an event are sponsored by tobacco companies and images are shared online.

• Corporate and campaign promotions. e.g. Philip Morris “Unsmoke” campaign

• Propaganda crusades e.g.  Philip Morris International and Altria: “Smoke-free Future”

• Tobacco use depictions embedded in commercial content in which those depictions are not legitimate expression. E.g. music videos

• Product integration.

• Sponsored news or “infotainment” content.

• Device advertising promotion and sponsorship. i.e. devices for consumption of tobacco products.⁴

11.11.1 Social media 

Social media platforms such as Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly known as Twitter), have become an enticing form of relativity underregulated new media teeming with a global audience of consumers. One of the earliest examples of the tobacco industry utilising social media for promotion was in 2009 when British American Tobacco (BAT) employees promoted BAT cigarette brands on Facebook.¹² (See Section 11.11.2.1 below for more on corporate communications as promotion). Social media blurs the line between entertainment and advertising for users, and offers to those wishing to use it for advertising advanced features that allow for precision targeting of consumer markets.¹³ Direct, paid tobacco advertisements on online social media are the easiest form of online TAPS to recognise, monitor and enforce. However, it can be difficult to distinguish between paid tobacco promotion and tobacco content that has no commercial connection.⁴ Moreover, paid tobacco advertising through social media is not consistently disclosed nor easy to recognise, see Section 11.11.1.1 Influencer promotions below.

Data gathered in 2023 from Australian adolescents in school years 10–12 found that on average, participants reported spending three to four hours on screens per day.² Participants most frequently reported using screens to watch video streaming content (95%), use social media apps (93%), and search the internet (92%). The most popular social media apps for Australian adolescents in 2023 were Instagram (79%), Snapchat (74%), TikTok (67%) and YouTube (66%). Adolescents reported spending the most time each day on TikTok, an average of two to three hours, compared to one to two hours per day on Snapchat and YouTube, and up to an hour on Instagram.² A 2023 scoping review¹⁴ on tobacco-related social media data from 2004 to 2022 found that among research that had been conducted on social media and tobacco, the most common platforms studied were Twitter (43%) (now known as X), YouTube (17%) and Instagram (13%). The authors noted that TikTok, as well as other social media platforms such as Snapchat, have been underutilised in social media and tobacco research to date. Among the studies in the review that performed a thematic analysis, pro-tobacco themes were prevalent in the data and included topics such as promotion (44%), product features (39%), user experience (35%), and lifestyle (34%).¹⁴  A 2024 study found that 61% of young people within the study who had used social media in the past month had encountered tobacco-related content.⁹ Tobacco-related content on social media is most commonly portrayed in a positive light, with one study finding 60% of tobacco-related content on social media portrayed positively, and 10% neutrally.¹⁵

11.11.1.1 Influencer promotion

Social media influencers are frequently approached by tobacco companies with proposals to subtly feature products in their content.¹⁶ Mere ‘product presence’ within posts, and links on account profiles leading to commercial websites selling tobacco products are among the more popular social influencer marketing strategies.¹⁷ Social media influencers do not always disclose that they are involved in such financial relationships with tobacco brands, violating regulations.¹⁷ In one study, only 43% of posts from social media influencers correctly disclosed a financial relationship.¹⁷ And among the social media influencers who did disclose a financial relationship with a tobacco company, 27% did so inconsistently.

A 2018 investigation led by the US based Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, found that tobacco companies were advertising cigarettes on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter by paying social media influencers—popular, primarily young people with large online followings—to post images of cigarettes and smoking.¹⁸ The investigation documented more than 100 social media campaigns globally by multinational tobacco companies Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco, Japan Tobacco International and Imperial Brands. The campaigns were primarily targeted at low- and middle-income countries. The social media influencers subsequently revealed in interviews that they were paid to promote cigarettes online to millions of followers without disclosing to those followers that they were engaged in paid advertising.

Findings from the investigation include the following:

• Tobacco companies seek out young people who have significant numbers of followers online and pay them to post photos featuring Marlboro, Lucky Strike and other cigarette brands. Social media influencers are trained on what cigarette brands to promote, when to post pictures for maximum exposure and how to take “natural photos” that do not look like staged advertisements. In Italy, influencers paid to promote Lucky Strike cigarettes were instructed to make sure health warnings on cigarette packs were not visible in photos posted online.

• Tobacco companies organise parties and contests with cigarette brand sponsorships and encourage participants to post on their social media accounts.

• Influencers are instructed to include specific hashtags promoting cigarettes on social media posts.

11.11.1.2 Event promotion and product integration:

Tying together in-person events with online promotion, especially through social media, is an effective way of increasing the reach of promotional messages. For example, in the biggest and most celebrated fashion event of the year in New York City—the MET gala—celebrities have blatantly violated New York City’s smoking ban in public places. American fashion designer, Marc Jacobs, posted an image of himself smoking during the event in the "girls’ room" with celebrities Courtney Love, her daughter Frances Bean Cobain, and Char de Francesco. Char de Francesco can be seen holding a Marlboro cigarette packet, associating the brand with exclusivity, celebrity, fashion and rebellion.¹⁹ However, it is unclear if these celebrities were paid/encouraged by the tobacco manufactures or marketing firms to post these images. See Figure 11.11.2. Courtney Love was a paid spokesperson for NJOY e-cigarettes in 2013.²⁰

A 2019 investigation by Robert Kozinets and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids uncovered tobacco companies inviting young social media influencers to parties and events where they were offered cigarettes and encouraged to pose and take photos with floor designs strategically modelled off cigarette brand logos.²¹ Promotion in this way exploits social media’s organic reach by encouraging ‘influencers’ to share photos of themselves with their many online followers, targeting a new generation of unsuspecting young people who are often underage and unaware that what they are looking at is effectively a paid advertisement.²¹ Although exposure to promotions of this kind may centre around young adults in the first instance, their influence can also be expected to trickle down to younger adolescents and children, who are keen to emulate adult behaviour.

In Australia, under the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Act 2023 (Cth), the provision of tobacco products at a private event or function that promotes smoking will be considered ‘publication’ of a tobacco advertisement, and accordingly, is likely to be prohibited.^22,23 However, social media’s transnational reach presents significant challenges for enforcement of national laws. A growing body of social media content depicts loose cigarettes being offered alongside customised matchbooks or lighters as glamorous party favours for guests at exclusive high-end luxury product and brand launch events in the fashion and culture industry in the US.^24-30 The attendees, who are frequently high-profile influencers and celebrities with substantial global reach on their personal and/or branded social media accounts, then disseminate this imagery to large audiences organically. In many images shared to social media the on-stick branding is visible, yet subtle. Moreover, the shape of the cigarette stick, for instance the slim variety (banned in Australia) used at Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘Gwyn’ brand launch event (see image A. in Figure 11.11.1.3 below), conveys a certain image presumably chosen to be in line with Gwyneth Paltrow’s familiar ‘wellness’ branding. See Section 10.6.3 Branding and visual design elements on the cigarette stick for more information. This trend of event party favours warrants scrutiny and monitoring from a tobacco control perspective. Whether or not tobacco industry coordination is involved, the practice is reminiscent of well documented historical product placement and Hollywood celebrity endorsement tactics used by the tobacco industry in the past that successfully glamorised tobacco use, making smoking appear aspirational and glamorous to young people, evidence of which is freely available in the tobacco industry internal corporate documents, released after historic litigation against the tobacco industry, see Appendix A1.11 Tobacco industry document repositories. Lifestyle and identity connotations embedded within tobacco advertisements are particularly appealing to young people.³¹ Specifically, imagery of sophistication, glamour and celebrity endorsements have been shown to be associated with increased appeal of tobacco ads among young people.³¹ The portrayal of smoking in the photos shown in Figure 11.11.3 below overwhelmingly convey a lifestyle of sophistication, glamour and luxury—traits associated with a high-socio-economic lifestyle. However, in reality, smoking behaviour is inversely related to socio-economic status, with disadvantaged groups in the population being more likely to take up and continue smoking, see Section 1.7 Trends in the prevalence of smoking by socio-economic status for more information.

For research on social media promotion and e-cigarettes see Chapter 18, Section 18.2.4.1.1 Social media and the use of social influencers

11.11.2 Corporate communications

Tobacco industry corporate communications that include unpaid posts on social media from both company branded accounts and employees falls under the ‘legitimate expression’ exemption to TAPS regulations. However, advocates argue these have the same media platforms and serve the same purpose as direct advertising, and it is an inappropriate use of the ‘legitimate expression’ exemption.⁴

Though the tobacco industry’s reputation in mainstream media is generally negative,^32,33 social networking sites provide it with an outlet to reinvent itself as a modern, friendly industry and dissociate itself from the harm caused by its products. New digital media thus offer tobacco companies a powerful and efficient channel for rapidly countering the denormalising strategies and policies of tobacco control. Adding to this potential is the increased use of social media as a way of engaging with brands and organisations.

In 2010 BAT employees were found promoting BAT and BAT brands on Facebook by joining and administrating groups, joining pages as fans, and posting photographs of BAT events, products and promotional items¹² (Figure 11.11.4). BAT employees undertaking these actions were from countries that had ratified the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which required parties to ban all forms of tobacco advertisements and promotions, including online and any cross-border exposure from countries which are not enforcing advertising restrictions.³⁴ BAT Scientific Communications Manager, Marina Murphy, responded to the Facebook study on the Tobacco Control Journal website, stating that:

‘Social media and other types of user-generated content sites are growing at a phenomenal rate. Because of this, earlier this year we reminded our employees, agencies and service providers of our long-standing rules, to ensure that they were in no doubt about their existing obligations and responsibilities as they apply to this relatively new and growing medium.

Our rules mean that employees, agents and service providers cannot freely and on their own initiative post advertising material, in whole or part, on social networking sites, blog sites, chat forums or other user-generated content sites such as YouTube, whatever the intention in posting the material may be. The web is vast and constantly changing, and no company can continuously police it. Things can happen there that we simply don’t know about. However, we can work hard to ensure that our rules on internet use are understood and applied by our own people and contractors, and we are doing so ...

Nonetheless, the report has drawn to our attention some specific instances which ‘if they have involved any of our employees or service providers’ would certainly be wrong and should not have happened. We are investigating these and if we find that Group employees or service providers have posted material that they shouldn’t, perhaps out of naivety, we will be telling them to remove it.’³⁵

11.11.2.1 Corporate and campaign promotions

11.11.2.1.1 Corporate Social Responsibility promotion

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an important tool for companies to improve their image and also acts as indirect advertising and promotion. The industry adeptly uses social media to tout its CSR agenda.³⁶ The use of third party CSR awards appears to be increasing and is used across various tobacco company- owned digital media channels.³⁷ Two early recorded examples of tobacco promotion disguised as CSR include the tobacco industry’s use of International Women’s Day^38,39 and the Black Lives Matter movement.⁴⁰

Celebrated annually on the 8th of March, International Women’s Day highlights the social, economic, cultural and political achievement of women, and also marks the call to action for accelerating gender parity. Philip Morris International (PMI) and British American Tobacco (BAT), both in 2017 and again in 2019, used social media platforms in an attempt to align their brand with women's empowerment and equality. In 2017, the theme was ‘Be Bold for Change’. PMI posted a 2-minute video (14,000 views 24 hours after posting) on its public Facebook page (more than 1.3 million members) that opens with the statement ‘changing one woman’s life can benefit a whole community’. The video also featured Womanity Foundation and how they valued the partnership between corporations and the social development sector. PMI, a partner of the Womanity Foundation, has been supporting social development capacity building and mentoring programmes in India and Brazil. BAT also used Twitter to feature images of female BAT employees, one of whom held a gift with a message about BAT’s commitment to diversity.³⁸ See Figure 11.11.5. In March 2019, the Twitter accounts of two major tobacco companies, Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco, used hashtags associated with International Women's Day (IWD) and the International Week of Women—#IWD2019 and #BalanceForBetter.³⁹ Attempting to harness feminism to sell more tobacco is not a new marketing strategy for tobacco, rather this attempt to promote itself as a driver of women’s equality is a more recent example of how tobacco industry marketing has sought to use emerging cultural contexts and reference points to build positive associations with smoking as a feminist act.³⁹

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is another example of tobacco industry promotion disguised as Corporate Social Responsibility. Tobacco companies attempted to capitalise on the 2020 BLM movement and used racial equity themes for their marketing strategies.⁴⁰ Tobacco companies utilised various methods including social media posts on platform such as Instagram and Facebook to signal their support for the movement. However, the marketing was focused on products that are disproportionately used by and cause harm to non-white communities, contradicting the BLM movement's goals of equity and the eradication of harm to Black individuals. This exploitation reflects the tobacco industry's historical pattern of aggressive targeting of Black communities and positions their pro-BLM messaging as performative.⁴⁰

A 2024 framing analysis³⁷ of five major tobacco companies found that the use of third-party awards as a CSR promotional strategy has been growing over time and is deployed across multiple company-owned media channels, including websites, reports, press releases and Twitter. Analysing content published between 2016 and 2021, the study identified nine promotional frames within four overarching themes: business excellence (including workplace culture, business performance and sustainability leadership); social responsibility (including health and wellbeing, protecting vulnerable populations and championing diversity and inclusion); environmental responsibility; and innovation and transformation. The study concluded that tobacco companies are capitalising on the perceived credibility of third-party awards to justify their continued role in society, with much of this promotional content appearing to contravene the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.³⁷

See Sections 10A.6.4 and 10.11 for more on the tobacco industry and Corporate Social Responsibility.

11.11.2.2 A ‘smoke-free future’

In 2019, Philip Morris International (PMI) launched its ‘Unsmoke Your World’ campaign. The campaign promoted a smoke-free future by encouraging people who smoked to quit cigarettes or switch to smoke-free alternatives. Evidence gathered by STOP, the Global Tobacco Industry Watchdog, strongly suggested that PMI’s campaign was nothing more than a public relations effort, and that PMI had been continuing to market combustible cigarettes, particularly in low to middle-income countries.⁴¹ The Unsmoke campaign was targeted to the public, and encouraged social media interaction including uploading images, sharing gifs and using the hashtag ‘#unsmokeyourworld’.⁴²

11.11.3 Regulation of online tobacco promotions

The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control— Article 13

Australia became a signatory to the WHO FCTC on 5 December 2003, soon after the Convention opened for signature. Australia was one of the first 40 countries to ratify the WHO FCTC, and so became a Party on 27 February 2005, the date on which the WHO FCTC came into force. Australia is thus legally bound to perform, in good faith, the full range of obligations outlined in the Convention. See Chapter 19 The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

Article 13 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) requires Parties to implement a comprehensive ban on all tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship (TAPS). The ban is intended to cover all forms of commercial communication, recommendation or action with the aim, effect or likely effect of promoting a tobacco product or tobacco use, whether directly or indirectly, and applies to both domestic and cross-border contexts across all media platforms, including the internet, social media and mobile technologies.^34,43

Amendment of the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act 1992 (TAP Act)

In May 2007, the Ministerial Council on Drug Strategy (MCDS) supported a move by the Australian Government to seek to amend the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act 1992 (TAP Act) to more explicitly prohibit advertising on the Internet.⁴⁴ Possible changes investigated by the Australian Government included broadening the current definition of ‘to publish an advertisement’ to include ‘transmitting’ the advertisement in electronic form.⁴⁴ The Government also sought to investigate the inclusion of elements such as:

• display listings of tobacco products for sale in a text-only format
• display prescribed graphic health warnings on the site
• require an age-restricted access system so that minors are discouraged from visiting the site and viewing the advertisements within
• quantify any and all taxes and other charges that may be payable over and above the advertised price on the product.

Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Amendment Bill 2010

In November 2010, the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Amendment Bill 2010 was introduced into Parliament. The then Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, stated that the legislation would bring restrictions on tobacco advertising on the Internet into line with restrictions in other media and those at physical points of sale. Online sales, advertising and promotion of tobacco were to be subject to the same kind of restrictions that are placed on over the counter sales. The main impact of the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Amendment Bill 2010 was focused on retailers who advertise their products without the required health warnings and as being ‘tax free’.⁴⁵ The legislation aimed to strengthen the TAP Act by making it a specific offence to advertise or promote tobacco products on the internet and all other electronic medium, unless compliant with State and Territory, or Commonwealth legislation.ⁱ The amendment was passed in both Houses on 08 February 2012. The amended legislation is cautious in its approach, as it only brings Internet advertising in line with advertising in other media and clarifies some uncertainty about the reach of the TAP Act.⁴⁶ Online sales of tobacco products, for example, were not banned as part of the changes. While the amendment aims to regulate tobacco advertising that has an Australian link, it can do very little about tobacco advertisements on overseas websites by foreign companies.

The Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Act 2023 (Tobacco Act)

The most comprehensive legislative development in this area came with the passage of the Public Health (Tobacco and Other Products) Act 2023 (Cth) (Tobacco Act), which significantly expanded the scope of earlier restrictions. Rather than targeting specific media or platforms, the Tobacco Act introduced a broad prohibition on any form of communication or activity that directly or indirectly promotes smoking, or the use of tobacco products. This encompasses written, visual, and audio-visual content across all formats, including internet and electronic media, films, radio, and even physical items such as clothing.²² There are some limited exceptions to the general prohibition on tobacco advertisements (such as limited forms of business signage, communications about government or political matters, and communications made for genuine academic/educational or scientific purposes).

The Tobacco Act also explicitly extends the general prohibition on advertising and promotion to vaping products. The advertising and promotion of vaping goods is additionally regulated under the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 (Cth) (TG Act) as amended by the Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation (Vaping Reforms) Act 2024 (Cth). Under the TG Act, the advertising and promotion of vaping goods is strictly prohibited in Australia, unless specifically authorised.⁴⁷ Guidance on compliance with the TG Act is available through the Therapeutic Goods Administration's ‘Vaping Hub’.⁴⁸

Beyond advertising, the Tobacco Act introduced a clear prohibition on tobacco and e-cigarette sponsorships, defined broadly as any contribution (financial or otherwise), to an event, activity, or person that promotes or is likely to promote smoking, vaping, or associated products.^49,50

11.11.3.1 Social media regulations

Social media companies have their own regulations that restrict content that promotes tobacco and other harmful products or services,^51-53 however researchers and advocates have pointed out that this kind of self-regulation has been ineffective.^54-58

Self-regulated social media policies are:

• Hard to interpret⁵⁴
• Not legally binding⁵⁴
• Are limited, rather than comprehensive, and contain many loopholes e.g. influencer marketing^55,59
• Compliance and enforcement by social media companies is weak.^56-58

Related reading

Test your knowledge

References

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