All of a twitter
How many of those precious leads have been followed up on?
The tobacco industry’s ‘global online activities’ need to be regulated, according to researchers in Australia.
‘Transnational tobacco companies are using Twitter to oppose tobacco control policy and shape their public identity by promoting corporate social responsibility initiatives in violation of [the] WHO [World Health Organization] Framework Convention on Tobacco Control,’ the researchers concluded in the abstract of a Tobacco Control paper published on the BMJ Journals website.
‘The tobacco industry has a long history of opposing tobacco control policy and promoting socially responsible business practices. With the rise of social media platforms, like Twitter, the tobacco industry is enabled to readily and easily communicate these messages.
The researchers said that all tweets published by the primary corporate Twitter accounts of British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands, Philip Morris International and Japan Tobacco International had been downloaded in May 2017 and manually coded under 30 topic categories.
Out of the 3,301 tweets analysed the most prominent categories of tweets were said to have been on topics that opposed or critiqued tobacco control policies (36.3 percent of BAT’s tweets, 35.1 percent of Imperial’s tweets, 34.0 percent of JTI’s tweets and 9.6 percent of PMI’s tweets).
All companies were said to have tweeted consistently to promote an image of being socially and environmentally responsible.
