Hidden Ads Disguised as "Influencer" Posts.

• Position: VAPING

Social media influencers vaping glamorously into their social media feeds often are not doing so for free, and research suggests that calling out their pay-to-play posts as advertisements in a plain, obvious way might have an impact on young people.

A study of 200 teens and young adults used eye-tracking technology to determine that tagging vaping-related influencer Instagram posts with #ad or #sponsored was effective in grabbing attention. The study appears in the Journal of Health Communication.

"The e-cigarette industry is paying these social media celebrities to do what they do best--shape young people's behavior, and our study gives us some hope that placing labels on these posts might be an effective tool to discourage young people from picking up a harmful habit," says lead author Liz Klein, associate professor of health behavior and health promotion at Ohio State University, Columbus.

"These people are called 'influences' for a reason. They get an amazing amount of attention, particularly from teens and young adults, and when they post about e-cigarettes they typically make zero reference to the fact they've been paid by the industry to make these posts."

Industry-backed social media activity is considered commercial sponsorship and technically should come with a disclosure in order to comply with Federal Trade Commission regulations, Klein points out.

Since the study was done, Instagram and Facebook have banned paid influencer posts that promote vaping and other tobacco use on their platforms. Practically speaking, however, most influencers are not tagging their e-cigarette posts as advertisements or sponsored content and there have been no details provided on how the bans instituted by the platforms are being enforced, the researchers indicate.

To understand how attention-grabbing the labels would be, the researchers studied the participants' viewing patterns while the teens and...