Researchers said the UK vape consultation automated responses were dominated by bots, with 90,835 of 118,756 submissions identified as automated. The finding came from the 2023 consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill and was published on Tuesday in Tobacco Control.
The automated submissions made up 76% of the total and were aimed at opposing the plan to ban disposable vapes. The Department of Health and Social Care excluded those 90,835 responses from decision-making after identifying them as bot-generated.
2023 consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill
Dr Nason Maani and Prof Anna Gilmore said the bombardment appears to be the first documented instance of large-scale automated interference in a formal public health policy consultation. They said all but two of the 90,835 automated responses answered the same question in the smoke free generation consultation, a pattern that made the scale of the campaign visible.
The department said its robust controls identified the attempt to influence the consultation. It said the responses were often duplicated many times and sent at high frequency from a small number of IP addresses.
Dr Nason Maani
Maani said future campaigns could become harder to catch. He warned that “the threat is that future campaigns become harder to catch, and what we can’t catch, we don’t know about. Such campaigns are a threat because they raise the possibility of a handful of powerful interests looking like a mass movement.”
Caroline Cerny said, “Evidence that AI bots have been used to swamp a Department of Health consultation is deeply concerning.” She added, “Given the tobacco industry’s history of seeking to undermine public health regulation, we need to be alert to the risk that technological advances can be used to further commercial interests around health policy and put safeguards in place.”
Department of Health and Social Care
Azzurra Moores called the attempt to derail the ban “pretty alarming” and said, “Public consultations are one of the main ways government opens up its decision-making, so any interference with them is a serious concern.” She added, “Better screening and more transparency will help, but there’s no single fix.”
The consultation has already fed into the law now in force under Keir Starmer’s Labour government, which inherited the tobacco and vapes bill in 2024 and passed it, including the ban on businesses selling or supplying disposable vapes. The unanswered question is how many genuine public responses remained after the automated submissions were removed.
