The Beijing Center for Diseases Prevention and Control has reported that more than 51,800 tobacco advertisements or promotions, which are banned, were found online in the first half of 2018, China Daily reported.

Online tobacco advertisements have been banned since 2016 in China. The data was collected by the Beijing CDC and Peking University between 1 April and 30 June on 14 major internet social and lifestyle platforms, according to the report.
The report found that roughly 15 per cent of the tobacco advertisements were embedded in stories about love, friendship and family.
“Compared with traditional tobacco advertisements, such information, dressed up in readable personal stories, is more difficult to identify through regular online supervision channels,” Zeng Xiaopeng, deputy director of the Beijing CDC, was quoted as saying.
“In Xiaohongshu, lifestyle-sharing platform that encourages mostly young consumers to write reviews and share their shopping experiences, more than 90,000 references could be identified with the key word ‘tobacco’, China Daily reported. Zeng said the Beijing CDC would continue to monitor online tobacco advertisements.