新加坡卫生部：正在严查社交媒体上推广电子烟的“网红”

Indeed, this is going to be a work in progress. We have already ongoing relations with the youth organisations and we have plans to continue building on these efforts. And I hope that we will also continue to get support from Members in disseminating the information to the right target audience.

Mr Speaker: Dr Wan Rizal.

Dr Wan Rizal (Jalan Besar): Thank you, Mr Speaker. My concern is really with regards to the monitoring of and regulating the influencers in promoting vaping products. I thank the Senior Parliamentary Secretary for sharing the efforts to mitigate vaping, but I do believe that the influencers have a very big impact on our youths today. From the accountability perspective, what measures are in place or what considerations would the Ministry take before holding such influencers accountable for promoting vaping products, especially if they are found circumventing advertising regulations?

My second supplementary question is with regards to the legal and regulatory updates. Given the evolving landscape of digital marketing, does the Ministry plan to update existing laws and regulations to cover newer forms of digital promotions, such as those through the influencers and viral challenges?

Ms Rahayu Mahzam: Mr Speaker, HSA is already doing upstream efforts in looking at the online space on sales and supplies of these e-vaporisers by monitoring illicit sales of e-vaporisers through social media, e-commerce and messaging platforms, and actually carries out operations regularly to target the sales of e-vaporisers on these platforms. We also have been engaging the larger platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Carousell to remove postings of illegal sales of such products.

As it stands already, it is illegal. All advertisements and sales of e-vaporisers are prohibited under the Tobacco (Control of Advertisements and Sale) Act. Recently, MOH and HSA issued a letter of notice to 16 social media and e-commerce platforms in March this year to remind them that hosting vaping-related content is in breach of the Tobacco Act. The onus is on these platforms to exercise due diligence and proactively remove vaping-related content that are targeted at Singapore residents. Enforcement actions may be taken against these platforms if they are found to have inadequate processes to detect.

We will continue to work with different agencies like MCI as well as IMDA. So, we are taking a multi-pronged approach on this. On the front, with the digital platforms, we are going upstream, we are trying to monitor, we are engaging with the platforms and we are also educating our people. So, I think this is something that we do need a whole-of-community support on, and we will do what we can to ensure that we will not let this take root in our community, but we do hope to get support from the community as well, to disseminate this message and to also extend the right information to the youths.

CF丨编辑

HQ丨编审

新加坡国会丨来源

新加坡国会丨图源