The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned Instagram posts from four vaping companies, including British American Tobacco (BAT), for illegally promoting e-cigarettes, reports BBC News.

BAT, Ama Vape, Attitude Vapes and Global Vaping Group were accused of promoting e-cigarettes and featuring models under 25 on their Instagram pages, which is banned according to the advertising code.
In response to the claims, BAT said that the Vype Instagram account in question did not allow under-18s and was used solely to inform users and communicate factual information, according to BBC News.
Anti-smoking groups Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) and Stopping Tobacco Organisations and Products (STOP) both backed the ban with ASH chief executive Deborah Arnott saying, “The law has always been clear that any advertising of e-cigarettes online is not permitted. BAT's defence that all they were doing was providing 'information' on social media not promoting their products has been blown out of the water.”
A spokesperson for Instagram said that they were updating rules to disallow paid promotions of tobacco or vaping products and parent company Facebook was quoted by BBC News as saying, "Earlier this year we updated our policy to restrict organic content that depicts the sale or purchase of tobacco products to over 18s. We are currently updating our branded content policies to no longer allow paid promotions of these products too."