British American Tobacco and three other firms’ use of platform ruled as advertising

British American Tobacco (BAT) and three other e-cigarette firms have been banned by the UK advertising watchdog from promoting their vaping products on public Instagram pages in a ruling described as “a huge step forward” by health campaigners.

The landmark ruling against the FTSE 100 tobacco giant and maker of brands including Lucky Strike, Dunhill, Rothmans and Benson & Hedges, puts the spotlight on tactics used to market increasingly controversial vaping and e-cigarette products to young people.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) rules ban the advertising of unlicensed, nicotine-containing e-cigarettes, however companies are allowed to put factual information about their products on their own websites. BAT, one of four companies to receive bans from the ASA for using Facebook-owned Instagram to promote vaping, had argued its Vype Instagram account was equivalent to a company-owned site.

The ASA rejected this claim, adding that BAT’s celebrity-driven ads “clearly went beyond the provision of factual information and was promotional in nature”.

The ruling followed complaints from Action on Smoking and Health, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Stop (Stopping Tobacco Organisations and Products) that Instagram posts from BAT, Ama Vape Lab, Attitude Vapes and Mylo Vapes broke advertising rules.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the Vype Instagram posts which featured Lily Allen promoting e-cigarettes. Photograph: Advertising Standards Authority/PA

The complaints focused on Instagram posts including seven early this year by BAT for its e-cigarette brand Vype, three of which featured captioned pictures of singer Lily Allen. Other posts promoting Vype congratulated Rami Malek on his Bafta best actor award for Bohemian Rhapsody and featured a picture of model Olivia Jade Attwood smoking an e-cigarette.

“The ASA’s ruling is a huge step forward in preventing tobacco companies from using social media to advertise to young people in the UK and around the world,” said Mark Hurley, director of international communications at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, one of three campaigning groups to lodge a complaint with the ASA. “While the ASA ruling is great news, urgent policy change is needed from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to prevent BAT and other tobacco companies from using social media to advertise their harmful products to young people around the world.”

Instagram has more than 20 million monthly users in the UK, almost 7 million of whom are aged between 12 and 24 years old and another 6 million are between 25 and 34 years old, according to research firm eMarketer.

The ASA’s ruling comes as the issue of vaping among younger people, and the health concerns emerging attributed to e-cigarettes, loads increasing pressure on the makers and marketers. In the US there have been more than 2,300 incidences of vaping-related lung injury, including 47 deaths.

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Late last year, the US Food and Drug Administration banned the sale of most flavoured e-cigarettes in tens of thousands of convenience stores and petrol stations across the US to curb the huge rise in vaping among teenagers.

“This is a major step forward in stopping the tobacco industry from promoting its new addictive products to children and teenagers,” said Professor Anna Gilmore, director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath. But given that cigarette sales are falling and tobacco companies are desperate to recruit young people into using these new products, ongoing vigilance is essential.”

In May, Tobacco-Free Kids and more than 125 organisations from 48 countries called on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat to immediately prohibit influencer marketing of tobacco and e-cigarettes on their platforms.

“We do not allow adverts that promote the sale or use of tobacco or electronic cigarettes,” said a spokesman for Facebook. “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.”