The content young people see on social media influences their behaviour towards alcohol, according to a new study.
Watching influencers drink alcohol in social media posts increases young people’s consumption desires, a new study has found.
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The research, conducted by Rutgers Health and Harvard University and published in JAMA Pediatrics, showed that exposure to alcohol on social media drives young people’s desire to drink.
“We wanted to move beyond association to establish temporal order, that is to say, participants’ desire to drink came about after watching the content,” said Jon-Patrick Allem, lead author of the study at Rutgers School of Public Health in New Jersey.
Young adults who viewed influencer posts with alcohol were significantly more likely to crave a drink than those who watched similar posts from the same influencers with no alcohol involved.
The study found that participants who perceived influencers as highly credible had dramatically greater odds of wanting to drink.
Allem said that none of the videos was overt commercials for alcohol. The content from the experiment was more subtle than an advert, depictions of alcohol that people come across daily on social media.
“Just the goings-on of daily life for the influencers in the video,” Allem added.
How did the experiment work?
The research included 2,000 participants between 18 and 24 years old in the United States, divided into two groups.
Both groups viewed 20 simulated Instagram posts from lifestyle influencers: in the first group, images of influencers who were consuming or displaying alcohol; the second group viewed the same influencers without the alcohol.
In one of the examples, some participants saw a couple preparing dinner while sipping wine, while the others saw a similar kitchen scene where the couple was drinking hot chocolate.
After adjusting for factors including daily social media use, lifetime alcohol consumption and previous exposure to alcohol marketing, the researchers found that participants who saw alcohol in the videos were 73 percent more likely to report increased desire to drink.
Alcohol consumption among young people
Alcohol consumption trends among young people in Europe show a continued decline, with both overall consumption and binge drinking falling over the past two decades, according to the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD).
“Decades of research show that the earlier someone takes their first drink, the more likely they are to experience alcohol-related problems later in life,” said Alex Russell, the study’s co-author at Harvard Medical School.
He added that delaying drinking initiation is a key prevention strategy, and, as online spaces like social media increasingly shape youth drinking behaviours, prevention efforts must also focus on these digital environments.
