Three quarters of all the responses to the UK's public consultation in 2023 on creating a smoke-free generation and restricting disposable vape sales were generated by AI bots, finds an analysis of publicly available data and Freedom of Information requests, published online in the journal Tobacco Control.
These responses were overwhelmingly targeted at opposing restrictions on disposable vape sales, the scale and directional consistency of which suggest a coordinated campaign, say the researchers.
AI bots have been used to spread health misinformation on social media platforms, point out the researchers. But while public consultations are increasingly used to inform health regulation, they are susceptible to automated interference, they add.
The researchers therefore wanted to find out if the 2023 public consultation on government proposals to create a smoke-free generation and curb vaping among young people had been subject to automated interference.
They drew on published consultation reports and Freedom of Information requests to the Department of Health and Social Care.
In all, 118,756 responses were submitted to the consultation, three quarters of which (90,835, 76%), the Department of Health and Social Care identified as fraudulent using bot detection methods.
All the bot-generated responses targeted a single multiple choice question opposing proposed restrictions on disposable vape sales. The same number reported learning of the consultation via social media.
But after the bot responses were excluded, 77% of the valid respondents supported restrictions on disposable vape sales—the opposite of what the unfiltered dataset would have indicated.
"This appears to be the first documented instance of large-scale automated interference in a formal public health policy consultation," write the researchers.
"While it is not possible to ascertain the commercial origins of such a campaign, transnational tobacco companies have sought to swamp earlier public consultations with favourable responses, using mass recruitment campaigns and postcard submissions," they explain.
"The scale and directional consistency of bot responses [in this instance] suggest a coordinated campaign, consistent with prior evidence of tobacco industry efforts to manipulate public consultations through mass coordinated submissions," they add.
The UK's Tobacco and Vapes Act received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026, making it illegal to ever sell tobacco products to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009, and restricting the supply and sale of disposable vapes.
The researchers acknowledge several limitations to their findings. For example, they couldn't independently verify the bot detection methods used by the Department of Health and Social Care as this information isn't publicly available, and the metadata and demographic information on the respondents was deemed exempt under Freedom of Information legislation.
The findings may not be applicable to other policy topics either, and on the basis of the information received, it's impossible to attribute source, intent, or commercial sponsorship, emphasise the researchers.
But they conclude: "As bot sophistication increases and public consultations expand across regulatory contexts, strengthening detection capacity and governance safeguards will be essential to maintaining the integrity of public health policymaking, particularly in lower-resource settings where screening infrastructure may be absent."
