Connecting world youth with tobacco brands YouTube and the Internet policy vacuum on Web 2.0

Background The Internet is an ideal forum for tobacco marketing as it is largely unregulated and there is no global governing body for controlling content Nevertheless tobacco companies deny advertising on the Internet Objective To assess the extent and nature of English language videos available on the Web 2 0 domain You Tube that contain tobacco brand images or words Methods The authors conducted a You Tube search using five leading non Chinese cigarette brands worldwide The themes and content of up to 40 of the most viewed videos returned for each search were analysed a total of 163 videos Results A majority of the 163 tobacco brand related videos analysed (71 2% 95% CI 63 9 to 77 7) had pro tobacco content versus a small minority (37%) having anti tobacco content (95% CI 1 4 to 7 8) Most of these videos contained tobacco brand content (70 6%) the brand name in the title (71 2%) or smoking imagery content (50 9%) One pro smoking music video had been viewed over 2 million times The four most prominent themes of the videos were celebrity/movies sports music and archive the first three of which represent themes of interest to a youth audience Conclusions Pro tobacco videos have a significant presence on You Tube consistent with indirect marketing activity by tobacco companies or their proxies Since content may be removed from You Tube if it is found to breach copyright or if it contains offensive material there is scope for the public and health organisations to request the removal of pro tobacco content containing copyright or offensive material Governments should also consider implementing Framework Convention on Tobacco Control requirements on the Internet to further reduce such pro tobacco content