Doctors collectively ask TikTok creators to remove content that shows and subconsciously promotes vapes.
The last few years, we’ve annually helped a collective of doctors to raise awareness for the Tobacco industry’s dirty games. And help people to change behavior. This year the focus is on vapes, an innovation from the tobacco industry to get young people addicted to nicotine. The industry calls them replacement smokers, we call them our valuable next generation. So we need to protect them.
Research found that one of the dirty tactics from the tobacco industry is to stimulate creators on TikTok to use vapes in their content. These role models thereby normalize this harmful product and promote a potential deadly lifestyle, often without being aware of those consequences. That needs to stop. Therefore we ask all creators on TikTok to remove their content with vapes and never show vapes anymore. We simply give them a choice: do you want to help the deadly tobacco industry become filthy rich over addicted teens or do you want to help the doctors to prevent sickness?
The campaign kicked off with an intimate conversation between doctor Noor Rikkers and influencer Dylan Haegens. Together they create the idea of simply presenting all creators on TikTok with the simple question of who they would rather help. In a talk show, prime time on Saturday, doctor Diederik Gommers explains the initiative and gets a first influencer to remove his vape-content. This is just the start… A collective of doctors make their debut on TikTok directly asking a wide range of creators to remove their vape content. Not by pointing fingers, but by simply explaining why it’s harmful and that they can make a simple choice: helping the tobacco industry or the doctors.
