November 10, 2025
JAKARTA – Many parents may do their best to prevent their children from becoming smokers, including by protecting them from tobacco product advertisements in supermarkets, on television and along the road, but these efforts may be futile in the digital age: The same danger also lurks online as video content that children can watch on their or their parents’ devices.
Recent monitoring by the Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFEnet) and Free Net From Tobacco (FNFT) found more than 2,000 YouTube videos accessible to all users that promoted tobacco products, including both conventional and electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes).
Some of the promotional content appeared in videos about online gaming, which is popular among children, with the creator consuming or placing the products in front of the camera. Others even featured links to the products sold on e-commerce platforms.
The researchers tried to flag the videos to YouTube, the second-most used social media platform in Indonesia with more than 140 million users. Despite their efforts, more than 300 videos were still accessible to users of all ages.
This might be just another tip of the iceberg, since the SAFEnet-FNFT monitoring focused only on YouTube. If we scroll through the timeline of other platforms, we might come across influencers either explicitly or implicitly promoting tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, via visually appealing and stylistic content.
These promotions aim to normalize smoking among teenagers in the country, where the number is already relatively high.
According to the Health Ministry’s 2023 Indonesia Health Survey (SKI), the country had up to 70 million active smokers, with minors aged between 10 to 18 years comprising 7.4 percent, or around 5 million.
Visually appealing and stylistic content promoting e-cigarettes also seems to work here, as the percentage of teenagers using the tobacco product increased from 0.3 percent in 2019 to 3 percent in 2021.
Aside from increasing the risk of noncommunicable diseases and premature deaths, smoking can also cause economic harm, not only for smokers and their families but also for the country.
The Tobacco Atlas estimated that smoking burdened the economy up to Rp 288 trillion (US$17 billion) from direct costs related to healthcare expenditures to indirect costs linked to lost productivity caused by illness and premature death.
The government actually has tools at its disposal to stop the promotion of tobacco products across online platforms, namely the 2023 Health Law and its implementing regulation, which bans digital tobacco ads. However, their enforcement has been weak relative to industry efforts to creatively and implicitly showcase their products by using influencers and adapting to algorithms.
The Communications and Digital Ministry also acknowledged bureaucratic hurdles to taking down tobacco promotions on social media and other platforms, as removing the content required so-called technical recommendations.
The SAFEnet-FNFT report should be a wake-up call for the government to eliminate these hurdles in order to prevent more children from becoming smokers, which could lead to lifelong complications and harm their future.
If the government is slow to act, the onus is on the technology companies behind the platforms to tighten surveillance against all content that promotes tobacco products, whether explicitly or implicitly.
YouTube claims to have “rigorously enforced” its policies by combining human review and machine learning technology. But the fact that hundreds of videos containing tobacco product promotion continue to fill users’ “For You” section across platforms indicate they are not doing enough to protect children, regardless of public pledges to protect children from potential harm through the use of their platforms.
Protecting children from tobacco product ads, in whatever form, should be a priority for both the government and online platforms, because there won’t be any bright future for a world filled with sick children due to smoking.