On August 3, Love Disk, a tobacco and liquor shop, posted an ad of a saleswoman holding three vapes up to the camera on Instagram. “The little beloved ones have arrived home,” the caption read.
There was a serious problem with the ad: Love Disk is located in Brazil, where the sale, import, and advertising of e-cigarettes has been illegal since 2009.
But such endorsements have gone unchecked in Brazil as Meta’s content policies allow attempts to buy, sell, trade, gift, and ask for nicotine products by profiles run by “legitimate” brick-and-mortar stores. The use of e-cigarettes has risen sharply in the country in recent years, with sales partly driven by social media platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp, according to a government report. Meanwhile, the Big Tobacco lobby in Brazil is pushing for their legalization, threatening to roll back decades of declining tobacco use.
“Today, we don’t have a legal framework to hold platforms accountable,” Stefania Schimaneski, who manages the registration and inspection of smoking products at Anvisa, Brazil’s health regulatory agency, told Rest of World.
The Brazilian government banned the sale, import, and advertising of e-cigarettes in 2009. For a while, it appeared that the ban was successful at keeping vaping rates down. According to Covitel, a nationwide survey to monitor risk factors for chronic illness in Brazil, 0.6% of people between 18 and 24 years were daily e-cigarette users in 2022. For comparison, in the U.S. and Canada, where some form of the practice is legal, 6.4% and 7.2% of people between 16 and 19 vaped regularly in 2022, respectively, according to a survey conducted by the University of Waterloo.
But the use and smuggling of vapes have been rising sharply in Brazil. Between 2018 and 2023, the number of Brazilians who admitted they had vaped in the 30 days prior to being surveyed grew from just over 499,000 people to more than 2.87 million, according to research by Ipec, a market research and public opinion polling company. The number of vapes seized from sellers and smugglers rose from more than 21,000 to roughly 1.37 million a year during that period, according to tax officials.
“We prohibit ads that promote the use or selling of tobacco or nicotine products, and related equipment,” Meta told Rest of World, referring to its standards for paid ads. “We use a combination of our community reports, technology and human review to apply our policies, removing non-complying content.”
By mid-August, Meta had blocked the availability of Love Disk’s Instagram account in Brazil. The shop has since created a new page that does not promote e-cigarettes.
“Since [vapes] are legal in other countries, big techs headquartered elsewhere work with porosity to the Brazilian law,” Vera Luiza da Costa e Silva, executive secretary of the National Commission for the Implementation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (Conicq), told Rest of World. More than 180 countries committed to curbing the tobacco epidemic by ratifying the convention — the U.S. is not one of them.
While Meta allows brick-and-mortar shops to sell tobacco products through its platforms, it prohibits shops from using its ad tools to boost that content to broader audiences. To get around this restriction, sellers have turned to other tactics, including advertising with digital influencers and creating accounts in bulk. Advertising vapes is a violation of Brazilian law.
A recent Núcleo Jornalismo investigation found that a vaping brand, Nikbar, created a network of at least 44 accounts focused on several Brazilian cities to sell e-cigarettes on Instagram. The brand promoted the accounts in partnership with over 25 digital influencers, including funk singer MC Kevinho and country singer Zé Felipe, whose combined followers on the platform surpass 50 million.
Some sellers in Brazil say they are not violating Instagram’s rules. “The posts only go live if Meta authorizes us,” Love Disk’s Instagram account told Rest of World via a message on WhatsApp. “They are who dictate what you can and cannot [post].” When Rest of World asked Love Disk about the vape ads on its Instagram profile, the store called the vape cartridges “third-party” products from other sellers, “not from the store.”
It’s not just Brazil: Seven other countries in the Americas, including Mexico and Argentina, have completely banned the sale of e-cigarettes. Some countries are increasing restrictions over the products; over a dozen others in the region lack any related regulation at all.
Authorities in the U.S. also face obstacles in enforcing tobacco control regulations on social media — nearly 90% of Instagram posts from tobacco-related brands don’t include warning labels from the Food and Drug Administration, according to researchers.
Rest of World found more than 100 paid ads from a single e-cigarette brand targeting Brazilians on Facebook.
A 2024 report from Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security about the illegal trade of e-cigarettes on the internet warned that there’s an “expressive amount” of accounts openly selling vapes on Instagram and “facilitating its access to a younger public.”
Anvisa, the country’s health regulatory agency, constantly monitors content on social media. Between January 2023 and June 2024, the agency took down more than 16,000 URLs linked to e-cigarette commerce by using Epinet, an artificial intelligence-based monitoring tool that continuously searches the internet for prohibited goods being sold, reported Núcleo Jornalismo. Smoking products, including vapes, accounted for around 5% of the total requested takedowns.
“If big techs aren’t concerned … it’s difficult for Anvisa to report everything being posted on the internet,” said Costa e Silva.
In April, the agency expanded restrictions over vaping promotion to include any “indirect” promotion, such as paid ads in communication outlets that attract the interest of the population and may simulate consumption.
Brazil’s Big 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 sale online. She argued that prohibition of the products has been ineffective and benefits the illicit trade. The bill prompted an open letter signed by 80 medical and scientific societies against legalization.
If big techs aren’t concerned … it’s difficult for Anvisa to report everything being posted on the internet.”
Thronicke is reported to have crafted the bill using data financed by the Big Tobacco lobby and has invited one of its prominent members to her public audiences. She did not respond to an interview request from Rest of World.
“Vapes increase the global nicotine market,” Paulo Corrêa, a coordinator at the Brazilian Society of Pulmonology and Phthisiology’s smoking commission, one of the groups that signed the letter, told Rest of World. They favor “the initiation to traditional cigarettes, and turning the population into dual users,” he said.
Meanwhile, buying vapes in Brazil is an easy process. People can purchase them through covert stores on iFood, a platform which controls 80% of the country’s food delivery market. IFood “constantly inspects stores to prevent the commerce of unauthorized products in the platform,” the company told Rest of World, adding that “AI tools have helped us identify irregularities and, wherever they happen, stores are automatically blocked.”
As of October 4, Love Disk has continued to sell vapes through WhatsApp.
