According to research, more than 90,000 automated responses were submitted to the British government during the consultation aimed at banning disposable vapes.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Bath found that 76 percent of the responses received to the British government’s 2023 tobacco and vape regulation consultation were submitted by bots. The Department of Health and Social Care classified 90,835 of the 118,756 submissions as abuse after detecting extremely rapid submissions coming from a handful of IP addresses.
According to the analysis published in the journal Tobacco Control, the automated responses were targeted at the question regarding the restriction of disposable e-cigarettes and, almost without exception, opposed the planned tightening of regulations. After excluding the fake submissions, the authorities found that the majority of valid respondents supported the ban on the sale of disposable devices.
According to the researchers, this may be the first documented case of automated intervention of this scale in an official public health consultation, although they were unable to prove the exact background or possible industry funding of the campaign. The attempted intervention did not stop the legislation: the ban on the sale of disposable vapes went into effect in the United Kingdom on June 1, 2025.
In brief
- Of the 118,756 responses received to the 2023 UK government consultation, 90,835 (76%) were submitted by bots.
- The automated submissions protested almost exclusively against the ban on the sale of disposable vapes.
- The authorities excluded the fraudulent responses, and the majority of real submissions supported the tightening.
- The researchers were unable to identify the organizations or financial sources behind the manipulation.
Source: Vaping360 (vaping360.com)
This summary was created by artificial intelligence based on the original article.