Extent and Characteristics of Illegal Tobacco Sales on Social Media X

Background: Despite legal restrictions on tobacco sales to minor in Korea, youth access to tobacco products remains widespread.Social media has emerged as a key channel for proxy tobacco purchasing and advertising.However, few empirical studies have quantified these activities.We investigated content related to illegal tobacco sales on the social media platform X. Methods: We collected 921,999 tweets using X's public API from August to December 2024.After de-duplication, 630,010 tweets remained.A multistep filtering process identified 4,031 tweets related to illegal tobacco sales.These were analyzed using descriptive statistics, content classification, and unsupervised clustering with KoBERT and K-means.Results: Tweets related to illicit tobacco sales showed an increasing trend over time.The most common category was posts promoting or offering to sell tobacco products (2,178 tweets), followed by tweets expressing proxy purchase intentions (1,405 tweets).Notably, 96 tweets used tobacco-related hashtags to promote other illegal activities, such as drug sales or sex crimes.Clustering identified additional categories, including sales of foreign tobacco products and bundled offers featuring contraband items such as alcohol and fake IDs.Most accounts posting illegal tobacco sales-related tweets had been created within the previous year.Conclusion: These findings highlight regulatory blind spots in existing tobacco-control frameworks, particularly in online environments.They underscore the need for AI-based real-time detection systems to monitor and address illegal tobacco transactions on social media.Moreover, strengthening tobacco-control measures could also curb illicit tobacco sales online by restricting product access.