These products have known health risks and are potentially harmful to people. Nine social media platforms have explicitly banned paid advertising of tobacco products, but the definitions of tobacco products vary between platforms. For example, Tumblr allowed paid advertising for e-cigarettes when it was “legal in the target market”. YouTube banned paid tobacco ads and limited the ability to monetize videos that promoted tobacco by labeling them as “with limited or no ads”.
Newer platforms, such as Twitch and Discord, had no tobacco promotion policies. This has always been the case even though tobacco is legal, eliminating an entire marketing avenue that most other companies take advantage of without problems. The FDA does not intend to enforce warning statement requirements on products that were manufactured before the compliance date (August 10, 2018) of the new mandatory warning statement for covered tobacco products, cigarette tobacco, and RYO tobacco. Tobacco promotion is prolific on social networks, and each platform sets its own restrictions on the promotion and sale of tobacco.
For example, Facebook has policies that restrict the advertising of products that are harmful to health, including products related to alcohol and tobacco. The statement made the bold claim that its advertising policies had “long prohibited the advertising of these products.” Tobacco control researchers have studied the cross-border promotion of tobacco less because non-native languages and locations in other countries are often omitted from social media surveillance (usually not in English and in non-U. S. languages).
The FDA may specifically restrict tobacco advertising in media and events that are attractive to young people, such as social media. Social networks facilitate the creation, exchange and display of promotional content in other countries with different jurisdictions and provide an optimal platform for the tobacco industry to evade tobacco promotional restriction policies. As the old rules no longer applied, big tobacco companies began using Internet platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, to circumvent advertising bans. So how can a smoking lounge compensate for lost revenue according to Google's advertising standards? The answer is simple: they can't advertise cigars on social media platforms due to their strict policies against promoting any product related to tobacco.
However, there are still ways for smoking lounges to reach their target audience without relying on social media ads. They can use other forms of digital marketing such as email campaigns or search engine optimization (SEO) to reach potential customers online. Additionally, they can use traditional marketing methods such as print ads or radio spots to reach their target audience offline.
