Misinformation about tobacco and vaping products explodes on YouTube
March 11, 2020
Par: communication@cnct.fr
Dernière mise à jour: March 11, 2020
Temps de lecture: 3 minutes
In an article[1] Published March 9, 2020 in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) found that from 2013 to 2019, different types of popular tobacco and vaping product-related videos on YouTube saw “a dramatic increase in views per day, particularly for vaping product tutorials.” YouTube is the second most popular site in the United States, after Google, and reaches 85% of teens. This wide distribution and strong presence among youth audiences gives it power to influence the information young people receive on all topics, including products that are harmful to their health, such as tobacco. The research follows a 2013 content analysis by the APPC that identified five broad categories of pro-tobacco videos on YouTube. APPC researchers used a set of keywords to locate pro-smoking videos on YouTube, from which they used a randomly selected set of 200 videos to create this taxonomy.
In 2019, the most viewed “educational” video was “the art of vaping,” which had garnered over 40 million total views, or over 68,000 views per day since its launch. In 2017, an English-language video titled “Is nicotine bad for you?” garnered nearly 345,000 views. It promotes the health benefits of nicotine. The easy accessibility of these videos suggests that YouTube is a fertile environment for promoting tobacco and vaping products despite the advertising bans that are supposed to apply. For countries that cannot ban such advertising, and given the difficulty of enforcing such bans online, one way to counter misleading videos is to[2] on tobacco, according to the APPC team, is to place corrective ads that counter misinformation on the same page as pro-tobacco videos.
©Generation Without Tobacco
[1] Albarracin D, Romer D, Jones C, Hall Jamieson K, Jamieson P Misleading Claims About Tobacco Products in YouTube Videos: Experimental Effects of Misinformation on Unhealthy Attitudes J Med Internet Res 2018;20(6):e229 [2] Daniel Romer, Patrick E. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Christopher Jones & Susan Sherr (2017) Counteracting the Influence of Peer Smoking on YouTube, Journal of Health Communication, 22:4, 337-345, DOI: 10.1080/10810730.2017.1290164 | ©National Committee Against Smoking |
- Fun presentations about the use of tobacco products;
- Instructional videos (especially on vaping and its use;
- Videos that claim to be related to the theme of harm reduction and that present how the risks of tobacco use could be managed through various “corrections”, without any justification or scientific basis
- Videos claiming that smoking has positive effects on health;
- Videos addressing the issue of risks with claims that the risks of tobacco use are minimized like any other risk in life, without addressing the risks of tobacco products.
In 2019, the most viewed “educational” video was “the art of vaping,” which had garnered over 40 million total views, or over 68,000 views per day since its launch. In 2017, an English-language video titled “Is nicotine bad for you?” garnered nearly 345,000 views. It promotes the health benefits of nicotine. The easy accessibility of these videos suggests that YouTube is a fertile environment for promoting tobacco and vaping products despite the advertising bans that are supposed to apply. For countries that cannot ban such advertising, and given the difficulty of enforcing such bans online, one way to counter misleading videos is to[2] on tobacco, according to the APPC team, is to place corrective ads that counter misinformation on the same page as pro-tobacco videos.
©Generation Without Tobacco
[1] Albarracin D, Romer D, Jones C, Hall Jamieson K, Jamieson P Misleading Claims About Tobacco Products in YouTube Videos: Experimental Effects of Misinformation on Unhealthy Attitudes J Med Internet Res 2018;20(6):e229 [2] Daniel Romer, Patrick E. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Christopher Jones & Susan Sherr (2017) Counteracting the Influence of Peer Smoking on YouTube, Journal of Health Communication, 22:4, 337-345, DOI: 10.1080/10810730.2017.1290164 | ©National Committee Against Smoking |
