You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 19, Issue 3
  • British American Tobacco on Facebook: undermining article 13 of the global World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

Research paper
British American Tobacco on Facebook: undermining article 13 of the global World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control
  1. Becky Freeman,
  2. Simon Chapman
  1. School of Public Health, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Becky Freeman, A27-School of Public Health, Room 129A, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; bfreeman{at}health.usyd.edu.au

Abstract

Background The World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) bans all forms of tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship. The comprehensiveness of this ban has yet to be tested by online social networking media such as Facebook. In this paper, the activities of employees of the transnational tobacco company, British American Tobacco, (BAT) on Facebook and the type of content associated with two globally popular BAT brands (Dunhill and Lucky Strike) are mapped.

Methods BAT employees on Facebook were identified and then the term ‘British American Tobacco’ was searched for in the Facebook search engine and results recorded, including titles, descriptions, names and the number of Facebook participants involved for each search result. To further detail any potential promotional activities, a search for two of BAT's global brands, ‘Dunhill’ and ‘Lucky Strike’, was conducted.

Results Each of the 3 search terms generated more than 500 items across a variety of Facebook subsections.

Discussion Some BAT employees are energetically promoting BAT and BAT brands on Facebook through joining and administrating groups, joining pages as fans and posting photographs of BAT events, products and promotional items. BAT employees undertaking these actions are from countries that have ratified the WHO FCTC, which requires signatories to ban all forms of tobacco advertising, including online and crossborder exposure from countries that are not enforcing advertising restrictions. The results of the present research could be used to test the comprehensiveness of the advertising ban by requesting that governments mandate the removal of this promotional material from Facebook.

  • Advertising and promotion
  • public policy

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode.

https://doi.org/10.1136/tc.2009.032847

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Funding This work was funded by grant 570869, The National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia on the use of web 2.0 internet sites to undermine tobacco advertising bans and to mobilise tobacco control advocates.

    • Competing interests None.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.