In the image, a group of friends is standing in a bar, smoke winding upwards from the cigarettes in their hands. More lie in an open packet on the table between them. This is not a photograph taken before smoking bans, but a picture shared on social media of a gathering in the metaverse.
Virtual online spaces are becoming a new marketing battleground as tobacco and alcohol promoters target young people without any legislative consequences.
A report shared at the World Conference on Tobacco Control last month in Dublin set out multiple examples of new technologies being adopted to promote smoking and vaping, including tobacco companies launching digital tokens and vape companies sponsoring online games.
It comes from a monitoring project known as Canary – because it seeks to act as the canary in a coalmine – run by the global public health organisation Vital Strategies.
“Tobacco companies are no longer waiting for regulations to catch them up. They are way ahead of us. We are still trying to understand what we’re seeing in social media, but they’re already operating in unregulated spaces like the metaverse,” says Dr Melina Magsumbol, of Vital Strategies India. “They’re using NFTs [non-fungible tokens]. They’re using immersive events to get our kids to come and see what they’re offering.”
In India, one tobacco company made and promoted an NFT, which represents ownership of digital assets, to celebrate its 93rd anniversary.
Canary scans for and analyses tobacco marketing on social media platforms and news sites in India, Indonesia and Mexico. It is expanding to more countries, including Brazil and China, and to cover alcohol and ultra-processed food marketing.
It is not set up to scan the metaverse – a three-dimensional, immersive version of the internet that uses technology such as virtual reality headsets to enable people to interact in a digital space. But it has picked up references to what is going on there via links and information shared on older social media sites.
Researchers say that children are likely to be exposed to any tobacco marketing in the new digital spaces given the age profile of users – more than half of the metaverse’s active users are aged 13 and below.
Social media companies have deep knowledge of how to drive engagement and keep people coming back for more views, says Dr Mary-Ann Etiebet, chief executive of Vital Strategies.
“When you combine that with the experience and the knowledge of the tobacco industry on how to hook and keep people hooked … those two things together in a space that is unknown and opaque – that scares me.”
Mark Zuckerberg, metaverse’s prominent backer, says in future “you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine” there. Already, that includes shopping and attending virtual concerts.
But Magsumbol describes it as “a new battleground for all of us” that is “being taken over by corporate entities that actually push health-harming products”.
“My daughter is very quiet, she’s an introvert. But online, on [gaming platform] Roblox, when she is killing zombies and ghosts, she morphs into a different avatar – she’s like Alexander the Great mixed with Bruce Lee and John Wick. She is so bloodthirsty,” she says.
“Online we behave differently. Social norms change … the tobacco industry knows that very well. And it’s so easy to subtly sell the idea that you can be anything, anyone you want.”
The metaverse art the team saw in Indonesia was shared on an Instagram account for electronic music lovers linked to Djarum, one of Indonesia’s largest cigarette companies. Another example showed a group having coffee, and looking for a lighter.
It all amounts to efforts to “normalise” smoking and vaping, says Magsumbol. “This kind of behaviour is happening and being done by your avatars, but is it seeping into your real life?
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“Digital platforms are being used to bypass traditional advertising restrictions and target young audiences,” she says. “What we’re seeing here is not just a shift in marketing, it’s a shift in how influence works.”
Other researchers have set out examples of alcohol being promoted and even sold in virtual stores.
Online marketing is a global issue. At the same conference, Irish researchers shared findings that 53% of teenagers saw e-cigarette posts daily on social media.
A World Health Organization official (WHO) says a rise in youth smoking in Ukraine is due, in part, to Covid and the war pushing children “too much online” and exposing them to marketing.
In India, Agamroop Kaur, a youth ambassador at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, includes social media marketing when speaking to schoolchildren about the dangers of tobacco and vaping. She has seen vapes suggested as a “wellness” item.
“I think educating youth on what an advertisement looks like, why it’s false, how you might not even see that it’s from the tobacco industry and it’s [content posted by an] influencer is really powerful because then that builds a skill – so that when they’re on social media, because they are digital natives, they’re able to see all of that and know that it’s fake and it’s not something they should be attracted by. I think building those skills early from high school to middle school, and even younger, is really important.”
The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control requires countries to implement bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship. Last year, signatories agreed that action was needed to tackle the increasing focus on “digital marketing channels such as social media, which increases adolescent and young people’s exposure to tobacco marketing”.
But there is no easy answer, says Andrew Black at the framework’s secretariat.
“The challenge of regulating the internet is not a problem that’s unique to tobacco. It’s a real challenge for governments to think about how they can provide the protections that society is used to in a world where borders are broken down because of these technologies.”
Nandita Murukutla, who oversees Canary, says regulators should take note: “What starts out small and you ignore, rises up to a certain point when you’ve got critical mass, and after that, it just explodes, and dialling something back is virtually impossible.”