E-cigarettes are selling well on Instagram in Brazil

Meta’s policy allows stores to buy, sell, trade, give away or request e-cigarettes on its platform, which contradicts Brazil’s ban on e-cigarette marketing.

Brazil's Senate is debating the legalization of e-cigarettes, with experts warning they could become a gateway to traditional cigarettes.

On August 3, Love Disk, a tobacco and alcohol store, posted an ad on Instagram that showed a female salesperson holding three e-cigarettes in front of the camera. The caption read: "The little ones are home."

There's a serious problem with this ad: Love Disk is based in Brazil, and the sale, import, and advertising of e-cigarettes have been illegal in Brazil since 2009.

But in Brazil, such support is not stopped because Meta’s content policy allows accounts of “legitimate” brick-and-mortar stores to buy, sell, trade, give away, and request nicotine products.

Brazil’s e-cigarette use has risen sharply in recent years, with some sales driven by social media platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp, according to a government report. At the same time, Brazil’s big tobacco lobby is pushing to legalize e-cigarettes, threatening to reverse decades of declines in tobacco use.

“Today, we don’t have a legal framework to hold the platforms accountable,” said Stefania Schimaneski, who is in charge of registration and inspection of smoking products at Brazil’s health regulator Anvisa.

The Brazilian government banned the sale, import and promotion of e-cigarettes in 2009. For a time, the ban appeared to succeed in curbing the number of people who vape. In 2022, 0.6% of people aged 18 to 24 were daily e-cigarette users, according to Covitel, a national Brazilian survey that monitors risk factors for chronic diseases. By comparison, in the United States and Canada, where some form of e-cigarette use is legal, 6.4% and 7.2% of people aged 16 to 19, respectively, vaped regularly in 2022, according to a survey conducted by the University of Waterloo .

But the use and smuggling of e-cigarettes has increased dramatically in Brazil.

The number of Brazilians who admitted to vaping in the 30 days before being surveyed rose from 499,000 to more than 2.87 million between 2018 and 2023, according to research by Ipec, a market research and polling firm. During that period, the number of e-cigarettes seized from sellers and smugglers rose from more than 21,000 a year to about 1.37 million, tax officials said.

Meta revealed its paid advertising standards: "We prohibit ads that promote the use or sale of tobacco or nicotine products and related devices. We use a combination of community reports, technology, and manual review to enforce our policies and remove content that does not comply."

By mid-August, Meta had blocked Love Disk's Instagram account in Brazil. The store has since created a new page that does not promote e-cigarettes.

“Because [e-cigarettes] are legal in other countries, big tech companies based elsewhere must comply with Brazilian law,” said Vera Luiza da Costa e Silva, executive secretary of Brazil’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (Conicq). More than 180 countries have ratified the convention, pledging to curb the tobacco epidemic, but the United States is not one of them.

Meta allows brick-and-mortar stores to sell tobacco products through its platform, but prohibits stores from using its advertising tools to promote such content to a wider audience. To get around this restriction, sellers have adopted other strategies, including advertising with digital influencers and creating accounts in bulk.

A recent investigation by Núcleo Jornalismo found that e-cigarette brand Nikbar created a network of at least 44 accounts on Instagram, mainly in several cities in Brazil, to sell e-cigarettes. The brand worked with more than 25 digital influencers to promote these accounts, including funk singer MC Kevinho and country singer Zé Felipe, who have a combined following of more than 50 million on the platform.

Some sellers in Brazil said they did not violate Instagram’s rules. “Only with Meta’s authorization can a post be published. They decide what you can and cannot post,” the Instagram account of Love Disk said in a message to Rest of World via WhatsApp. When Love Disk was asked about the e-cigarette ads on its Instagram profile, the store said the e-cigarette cartridges were “third-party” products from other sellers and “not from the store.”

It's not just Brazil: Seven other countries in the Americas, including Mexico and Argentina, have outright banned the sale of e-cigarettes. Some are tightening restrictions on the products; a dozen other countries in the region have no regulations at all.

U.S. authorities also face obstacles when enforcing tobacco control regulations on social media — researchers found that nearly 90% of Instagram posts from tobacco-related brands did not include Food and Drug Administration warning labels.

Rest of World found more than 100 paid ads on Facebook from an e-cigarette brand targeting Brazilians.

A 2024 report on the illegal trade in e-cigarettes on the internet by Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security warned that there were a “large number” of accounts on Instagram that openly sold e-cigarettes and “facilitated access to e-cigarettes for a younger public.”

Brazilian health regulator Anvisa constantly monitors content on social media. Between January 2023 and June 2024, the agency removed more than 16,000 URLs related to e-cigarette commerce using Epinet, an AI-based monitoring tool that constantly searches the internet for banned goods being sold, Núcleo Jornalismo reported. Smoking products, including e-cigarettes, accounted for about 5% of the total removal requests.

In April, the agency expanded restrictions on e-cigarette promotions to include any “indirect” promotion, such as paid advertising in communications channels that attract interest and may simulate consumption.

Brazil's large tobacco lobby is pushing for legalization. In October 2023, right-wing Senator Soraya Thronicke introduced a bill backed by the tobacco industry to legalize e-cigarettes and authorize their online sales. She argues that banning these products is ineffective and favors illegal trade. The bill triggered an open letter signed by 80 medical and scientific associations opposing legalization.

“E-cigarettes expand the global nicotine market,” said Paulo Corrêa, coordinator of the Brazilian Pulmonary Society’s smoking committee, one of the groups that signed the letter. They favor “initiating people to traditional cigarettes and converting them into dual users.”

Meanwhile, the process of buying e-cigarettes in Brazil is simple. People can buy them through secret stores on iFood, a platform that controls 80% of the country's food delivery market. iFood said it "constantly checks stores to prevent unauthorized products from being sold on the platform," adding that "artificial intelligence tools help us identify violations and wherever they occur, the store is automatically blocked."

As of October 4, Love Disk continues to sell e-cigarettes through WhatsApp.