Earlier studies have documented lots of smoking and other tobacco use in popular US and Indian streaming media programs, with most of exposure coming from programs produced by American companies, most notably Netflix and Amazon. Now Matthis Morgenstern and colleagues (including me) have shown that the same thing is true in popular German streaming programs.
Our new paper, “Smoking in Popular Streaming Shows and Youth Protection in Germany” reported that 25 of the 35 highest user-rated series (71%) from 2017-2020 had at least one episode that contained smoking. This proportion was 71% for Netflix productions (12/17), 60% for Amazon Prime series (6/10), and 88% for series of other streaming services (7/8). While none of the episodes rated below “12” (i.e., suitable for 12 year old viewers) in Germany had smoking, 20% of episodes rated “12” and 28.3% rated “16” included smoking. In other words, smoking was common in programs rated for youth at the prime ages for smoking initiation.
32% of episodes rated “18” included smoking.
The US Surgeon General and others have concluded that exposure to onscreen smoking causes youth to start smoking. More recent research has shown that exposure to smoking onscreen predicts vaping among youth and young adults.
In short, smoking content is highly prevalent in popular streaming series and age ratings do not reliably inform parents about the presence of smoking in a youth program in Germany. Given the fact that streaming series are consumed not only by German youth but by youth all around the world, effective measures should be developed and implemented to prevent children and adolescents from being exposed to smoking in streaming platforms.
To date, India is the only country that has taken steps to solve this problem.
Here is the abstract:
Aim was to investigate the amount of smoking in popular streaming series in Germany with a focus on the comparison between series recommended for adults versus youth. The sample was drawn from the 35 highest user-rated streaming series, that released 1794 new episodes between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2020. One-third of the episodes (N = 598) were randomly selected and analyzed for smoking content. The age ratings of these episodes ranged from 6 to 18 years, with categories of “6”, “12”, “16” and “18” years. Ten of the 35 shows (28.6%) were completely smoke-free, 25 shows (71.4%) had at least one episode with smoking. Of all analyzed episodes, 25.1% contained smoking (range = 1 to 36 smoking scenes; median = 4). There was a statistically significant association between episode age rating and the presence of smoking (χ2[3] = 9.1; p = 0.028; Spearman’s rho = 0.11): The proportion of episodes with smoking was 0% for episodes with age ratings below 12 years, 20.4% for age ratings “12”, 28.3% for age ratings “16”, and 32.4% for age ratings “18”. This association differed between streaming services, but all services had smoking in episodes rated for youth. Smoking is common in popular streaming series. None of the streaming services meet the recommendations of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control to reliably restrict young people’s access to media content that depicts smoking.
The full citation is Morgenstern M, Glantz SA, Neumann C, Hanewinkel R. Smoking in Popular Streaming Shows and Youth Protection in Germany. J Community Health. 2023 Aug 21. doi: 10.1007/s10900-023-01270-0. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 37605099. It is available here.
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