Cigarette labels were bad. Social media labels would be worse | The Business Standard
Skip to main content
  • Latest
  • Economy
    • Banking
    • Stocks
    • Industry
    • Analysis
    • Bazaar
    • RMG
    • Corporates
    • Aviation
  • Videos
    • TBS Today
    • TBS Stories
    • TBS World
    • News of the day
    • TBS Programs
    • Podcast
    • Editor's Pick
  • World+Biz
  • Features
    • Panorama
    • The Big Picture
    • Pursuit
    • Habitat
    • Thoughts
    • Splash
    • Mode
    • Tech
    • Explorer
    • Brands
    • In Focus
    • Book Review
    • Earth
    • Food
    • Luxury
    • Wheels
  • More
    • Sports
    • TBS Graduates
    • Bangladesh
    • Supplement
    • Infograph
    • Archive
    • Gallery
    • Long Read
    • Interviews
    • Offbeat
    • Magazine
    • Climate Change
    • Health
    • Cartoons
  • বাংলা
The Business Standard

Thursday
June 12, 2025

Sign In
Subscribe
  • Latest
  • Economy
    • Banking
    • Stocks
    • Industry
    • Analysis
    • Bazaar
    • RMG
    • Corporates
    • Aviation
  • Videos
    • TBS Today
    • TBS Stories
    • TBS World
    • News of the day
    • TBS Programs
    • Podcast
    • Editor's Pick
  • World+Biz
  • Features
    • Panorama
    • The Big Picture
    • Pursuit
    • Habitat
    • Thoughts
    • Splash
    • Mode
    • Tech
    • Explorer
    • Brands
    • In Focus
    • Book Review
    • Earth
    • Food
    • Luxury
    • Wheels
  • More
    • Sports
    • TBS Graduates
    • Bangladesh
    • Supplement
    • Infograph
    • Archive
    • Gallery
    • Long Read
    • Interviews
    • Offbeat
    • Magazine
    • Climate Change
    • Health
    • Cartoons
  • বাংলা
THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 2025
Cigarette labels were bad. Social media labels would be worse

Panorama

Stephen Mihm; Bloomberg
01 July, 2024, 11:15 am
Last modified: 01 July, 2024, 12:22 pm

Related News

  • Up in smoke: Cigarette paper duty doubled
  • Global crises disrupt effort to get millions to quit smoking: report
  • Shopkeeper fatally stabbed following dispute over '2 unpaid cigarettes' in Munshiganj
  • Importer brings 1.25 crore foreign cigs hiding in orange consignment
  • Young doctors call for cutting cigarette price tiers from four to three to curb consumption

Cigarette labels were bad. Social media labels would be worse

The tobacco industry used the warnings to avoid regulation and liability. Big Tech could do the same

Stephen Mihm; Bloomberg
01 July, 2024, 11:15 am
Last modified: 01 July, 2024, 12:22 pm
Labels aren’t the answer. Photo: Bloomberg
Labels aren’t the answer. Photo: Bloomberg

Last week, Vivek Murthy, surgeon general of the United States, warned that the use of social media among adolescents has contributed to a surge in anxiety and depression. 

In a widely read op-ed, he argued that Congress should take action, forcing the social media giants to attach warning labels on their products in much the same ways that it did with cigarette makers.

This may sound like a good idea, but the history of cigarette labels suggests otherwise. That earlier effort at warning consumers underscores how such well-intentioned measures can easily end up serving the interests of the corporations they were meant to regulate.

The Business Standard Google News Keep updated, follow The Business Standard's Google news channel

In the 1950s, scientific consensus was finally coalescing around the dangers of tobacco as a series of studies — some conducted under the auspices of the nation's Public Health Service — established a clear connection between smoking and lung cancer. 

But the industry fought back, sowing doubt about the research and hiring doctors to argue that their products were safe. 

The turning point came in 1964, when a special committee appointed by President John F Kennedy published a report that laid out an incontrovertible case that smoking was behind not only lung cancer, but a host of other ills.

The report gave regulators at the Federal Trade Commission a rationale to act. The agency, which regulated false or misleading product claims, argued that the tobacco companies would commit "an unfair or deceptive act" if they failed to disclose in advertising and on packaging that "cigarette smoking is dangerous to health and may cause death from cancer and other diseases."

Lawyers advising the cigarette companies warned that the industry would soon be forced to accept some kind of labelling. In fact, a number of state legislatures soon started introducing bills that regulated the promotion of cigarettes. 

At the same time, some smokers who blamed the companies for cancer and other health issues started filing lawsuits. Confronted with these challenges, the tobacco industry shifted strategy.

In his account of this period, historian Allan Brandt has described how the tobacco industry turned the tables on its critics. 

"If the industry could not avoid government action," Brandt writes, "it could ensure that … action was taken in their preferred venue: the US Congress."

The industry knew it had allies in Congress who might help dilute the impact of warning labels; tobacco lobbyists worked closely with them to draft relatively innocuous language that would appear on every package of cigarettes: "Smoking may be hazardous to your health."

But as Brandt has demonstrated, the strategy of enlisting Congress went well beyond political alliances. 

The lawyers who conceived of this strategy also did so because federal legislation about warning labels would effectively preempt other ways of holding the companies responsible.

This strategy of preemption, Brandt observes, meant several things. First, if the tobacco companies could get Congress to take the lead on warning labels, it could essentially forbid individual states from doing the same. 

In practice, this tied the hands of progressive states who wanted to force companies to be more explicit about the risks of cigarettes.

At the same time, with Congress taking the lead, the tobacco companies simultaneously preempted the regulatory authority of government agencies; the final version of the legislation explicitly forbade the FTC from exercising any regulatory oversight over the cigarette makers.

Finally, the labels preempted potential lawsuits. As Brandt notes: "Among the many advantages of legislation requiring a label was that it allowed the industry to insist — in court if necessary — that claims against the companies for negligence and deception were now moot." 

The proposed labels ensured that smokers had been warned. If they got lung cancer, it was their own fault.

The Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 delivered everything that the tobacco industry wanted. It preserved the fiction that no scientific consensus existed — "smoking may be hazardous to your health" — while simultaneously thwarting federal regulators. 

Most importantly, it effectively stopped smokers from filing lawsuits against the companies.

This was well understood at the time. After the bill passed, the New York Times described the legislation as having protected "the economic health of the tobacco industry by freeing it of proper regulation." 

In fact, a year later, rates of smoking, which briefly dipped after the 1964 report, had hit new all-time highs. And while smoking has finally fallen out of fashion in recent years — due in part to the spread of vaping — warning labels, even graphic ones, seem to have had little effect. 

Instead, the warnings' lasting impact has been tobacco companies' ability to dodge scrutiny and responsibility for decades.

This sorry episode holds lessons for today. While scientists eventually reached an accepted consensus on the ills of smoking, no such agreement exists about the effects of social media. This means that any warning label will be provisional, tentative and ambiguous, much like the one crafted by the tobacco companies nearly 60 years ago. 

Once in place, such a label would almost certainly complicated efforts to hold the tech companies responsible via other avenues, including federal regulation, state laws and individual lawsuits. 

Or to distil this into to a package-size label: "Warning: enlisting Congress to put ambiguous declarations of danger on products will achieve nothing while simultaneously shielding the companies responsible."


Stephen Mihm is a professor of history at the University of Georgia and the coauthor of "Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance."


Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.

Features / Top News / Global Economy

cigarette / Smoking / Tobacco industry / Big Tech / Tech giants

Comments

While most comments will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive, moderation decisions are subjective. Published comments are readers’ own views and The Business Standard does not endorse any of the readers’ comments.

Top Stories

  • Home Affairs Adviser Lieutenant General (Retd.) Jahangir Alam Chowdhury speaks to journalists in Salna, Gazipur, on 12 June 2025. Photo: TBS
    No bar to Tarique Rahman returning to Bangladesh: Home adviser
  • Govt to set up Debt Office as loan burden to hit Tk29 lakh cr by FY28
    Govt to set up Debt Office as loan burden to hit Tk29 lakh cr by FY28
  • Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus and BNP Acting Chairman Tarique Rahman. Photos: Collected
    Tarique may propose election in first week of February in meeting with CA

MOST VIEWED

  • File photo of ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina and her son Sajeeb Wazed Joy. Photo: Collected
    Joy spends Eid with Hasina in India: Indian media
  • Infofgraphics: TBS
    DGHS issues 11-point directive to prevent spread of Covid-19 in Bangladesh
  • Saifuzzaman Chowdhury. Photo: Collected
    UK crime agency now freezes assets of ex-land minister Saifuzzaman: AJ
  • File photo of BNP Standing Committee Member Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury. Photo: Collected
    Khasru flies to London ahead of Yunus-Tarique meeting
  • Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus speaks at the Chatham House in London on 11 June 2025. Photo: CA Press Wing
    No desire to be part of next elected govt: CA Yunus
  • Illustration: Khandaker Abidur Rahman/TBS
    Three hospitals ‘held hostage’ as discharged July uprising injured keep occupying beds

Related News

  • Up in smoke: Cigarette paper duty doubled
  • Global crises disrupt effort to get millions to quit smoking: report
  • Shopkeeper fatally stabbed following dispute over '2 unpaid cigarettes' in Munshiganj
  • Importer brings 1.25 crore foreign cigs hiding in orange consignment
  • Young doctors call for cutting cigarette price tiers from four to three to curb consumption

Features

Among pet birds in the country, lovebirds are the most common, and they are also the most numerous in the haat. Photo: Junayet Rashel

Where feathers meet fortune: How a small pigeon stall became Dhaka’s premiere bird market

19h | Panorama
Illustration: Duniya Jahan/ TBS

Forget Katy Perry, here’s Bangladesh’s Ruthba Yasmin shooting for the moon

1d | Features
File photo of Eid holidaymakers returning to the capital from their country homes/Rajib Dhar

Dhaka: The city we never want to return to, but always do

3d | Features
Photo collage shows political posters in Bagerhat. Photos: Jannatul Naym Pieal

From Sheikh Dynasty to sibling rivalry: Bagerhat signals a turning tide in local politics

4d | Bangladesh

More Videos from TBS

Delhi on Boil: Red Alert as Temperatures Soar

Delhi on Boil: Red Alert as Temperatures Soar

19m | TBS Stories
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer did not respond to a request to meet with Dr. Muhammad Yunus

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer did not respond to a request to meet with Dr. Muhammad Yunus

1h | TBS World
My words have been misinterpreted: Shafiqul Alam

My words have been misinterpreted: Shafiqul Alam

1h | TBS Stories
What did the Chief Advisor do on the second day of his UK visit?

What did the Chief Advisor do on the second day of his UK visit?

2h | TBS Stories
EMAIL US
contact@tbsnews.net
FOLLOW US
WHATSAPP
+880 1847416158
The Business Standard
  • About Us
  • Contact us
  • Sitemap
  • Advertisement
  • Privacy Policy
  • Comment Policy
Copyright © 2025
The Business Standard All rights reserved
Technical Partner: RSI Lab

Contact Us

The Business Standard

Main Office -4/A, Eskaton Garden, Dhaka- 1000

Phone: +8801847 416158 - 59

Send Opinion articles to - oped.tbs@gmail.com

For advertisement- sales@tbsnews.net