Health experts are raising concerns on the ads promoting alcohol in the most traffic drawing sites on internet such as social networking sites. The alcohol companies are taking it as an advantage to market their products through popular networking sites like facebook and twitter.
The majority of the people who are exposed to these popular sites are the youngsters. So, all the alcohol companies are directly targeting the teen group who can adopt the changes very easily. Since any one can get an account in these sites by mentioning the wrong age, even small kids are also being exposed to these ads and getting influenced.
This issue was reported in the New Media, New Problem, which also highlighted the fact that the teenagers who celebrate parties and booze hard used to post their pictures and videos of their party and add descriptions of themselves being drunk. This kind of activities alos influence the people watching them since they tend to enjoy in the same manner as their peers do.
The report found some interesting stats as below
- 37% of the children aged 13-15, have seen the photos of their friends drunken on social networking sites.
- 8% of the 9 year old pupils and 25% of 11 year old pupils in Wales have been drunk at least 4 times a week and 14% of the 9 year old pupils and 31% of the 11 year old pupils drink alcohol every week.
- 49% of the children aged 8-17 in UK have an account in a social networking site despite of the minimum age being around 13 years for most of the sites.
The experts are raising issues for a ban on alcohol related things in social networking sites since lot of youngsters are being exposed to these sites and thereby ads most of the time.