Control over Online Tobacco
On April 20, 2019, China’s most popular messaging app, WeChat, blocked all public accounts that posted tobacco service information and policy guidance as well as corporate accounts of the tobacco industry, a move that alarmed the industry as well as the public.
By TobaccoChina Online
The traditional method of tobacco advertising on the internet by posting product images and slogans has almost disappeared since China implemented the Interim Measures for the Administration of Internet Advertising (IMAIA) in September 2016. Information released by the tobacco industry on the internet has also been under very strict control. However, it is the first time for WeChat to impose a single solution to cut off all tobacco information released on its platform.
Why now?
The reason for WeChat adopting this practice was an incident that occurred on April 15 this year, when the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Beijing CDC) released the Report on 2018 Internet Tobacco Marketing Data Monitoring. The findings of the report are as follows:
1) There were large amounts of online tobacco marketing information;
2) Although men still dominated the consumer groups of cigarettes in China on the internet platform, women and young people tended to be the main targets of tobacco marketing information.
3) Compared with traditional forms of advertising, online tobacco marketing information was dressed up as soft advertising.
According to the report, a total of 51,892 tobacco advertisements or promotions; 7,289 tobacco news stories; and 47,304 smoker discussions were released in the first half of 2018. Of those related to tobacco advertisements or promotions, 39,507 news stories were about tobacco sales from tobacco agents, accounting for 76.13%; 1,959 news stories were about tobacco purchasing and sales, accounting for 3.78%; 1,977 were about tobacco advertisements, accounting for 3.81%; and 265 were about tobacco sponsoring, accounting for 0.51%.
Beijing CDC also stressed that the sales information of tobacco agents topped the relevant information collected this time, which didn’t involve the China National Tobacco Corporation and its subsidiaries. However, on the same day the agency released the report, Xinhua News Agency Online, the official state-run press agency of China, published an article, Beijing CDC: Efforts to Be Stepped up to Strengthen Internet Tobacco Marketing Supervision. People’s Daily Online, the biggest newspaper group in China, then published an article –Tobacco Soft Advertisements Were Embedded in App, the Treatment Should Go beyond “Off the Shelf.” Many domestic media outlets immediately followed suit, making this a hot issue attracting social focus.
Consequently, WeChat officials quickly shut down almost all the public accounts involving tobacco, including the official government service accounts of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration (STMA).
The dispute
The focus of WeChat’s actions was that the public accounts were banned as long as they posted any tobacco content, regardless of whether they violated relevant laws or regulations.
This practice is obviously unfair to those public, policy, information-based, and service-based public platforms, because according to China’s IMAIA, as long as the internet is not used to publish tobacco advertising, to carry out tobacco marketing, nor to promote cigarette brands, they should be retained. WeChat’s move, however, has let down many who have been obeying the law.
More importantly, this incident with WeChat conveyed a clear signal that China’s control over tobacco promotion will get stricter.
In fact, the most prominent case in the report is about Xiaohongshu, a lifestyle-sharing app that encourages mostly young consumers to write reviews and share their shopping experiences, in which more than 90,000 references could be identified with the key word “tobacco”. There were two main types of tobacco information sources. One was the popular e-cigarettes available in the market, which benefited from legal gaps and regulatory blind spots to publish various soft advertisements to induce consumption. The other source was traders who used the internet platform to illegally sell cigarettes, including a large number of counterfeit and smuggled cigarettes that were difficult for ordinary consumers to distinguish, which was also the key issue of market regulation by the tobacco monopoly law enforcement departments.
Till now, no tobacco-related content can be discovered on the Xiaohongshu platform with keywords such as “cigarettes” and “tobacco”. But, if you search for “e-cigarette”, there are still a lot of embedded advertisements, which further shows that the content that really needs control has not been handled.
The practice taken by the WeChat platform to limit access to all tobacco-related public accounts is hardly encouraging. On the one hand, they recklessly blocked all administrative and service public accounts which always observed laws and disciplines and just communicated internal information on behalf of the tobacco industry. On the other hand, a large amount of embedded tobacco sales information marketing online still goes beyond the arm of the law under the cover of evaluation, tasting, and sharing. Featured in a shopping story or appearing as a discussion of lifestyle, it is difficult to regulate and control this part of tobacco information.
Thinking
China’s Tobacco Monopoly Law clearly states that “tobacco monopoly administration is implemented, and the production and operation of tobacco monopoly products is planned and organized”. In 2003, the Chinese government also signed to join the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), which entered into force in China in January 2006. Over the past decade, China has won recognition by tobacco control organizations for its tremendous progress in efforts of tobacco control compliance. In other words, the tobacco industry as a legitimate industry should not be punished against the release of the content permitted by laws and regulations.
For acts specified in the advertising law, if there is sufficient evidence to prove that they fall under advertisements, they should be banned and severely punished. But if they are only “suspected” of violating or do not violate any laws and regulations at all, it is worth considering whether it is appropriate to prohibit or block all public accounts just because they may be involved with the tobacco industry.
China has been rapidly advancing tobacco control over the past two years. Since 2016, more than 20 cities have promulgated the most stringent tobacco control laws in history, including Beijing and Shanghai, and many airports have demolished their smoking rooms. Some shopping malls and restaurants have also strictly prohibited smoking. Smokers increasingly have nowhere to smoke.
Prior to this latest development with WeChat, even though China implemented strict control over tobacco on the Internet it was also confined to the legal framework. The unconventional practice taken this time that “would rather kill all just for one” made people feel that the attitude of the tobacco control sector was extremely irrational. It can even be said that it is just the beginning for China to go too far on the journey to control tobacco.