After leaving high school, drinking patterns tend to intensify: a study in the United Kingdom, for example, showed that almost two-thirds of college students have a hazardous alcohol consumption score on the AUDIT scale ( Davoren et al., 2016). For example, in the Netherlands, most adolescents drink their first alcohol consumption when they are 14 or 15 years of age, and almost half of all 16 year olds have engaged in binge drinking at least once (i.e., more than 4/5 drinks on one occasion), even though the legal purchasing age in the Netherlands is 18 years ( Van Dorsselaer et al., 2016 Nationale Drug Monitor, 2017 Stevens et al., 2017). Young people start drinking quite early on.

We therefore advice future researchers to further investigate this topic, and propose that legislation for alcohol advertising needs to be adjusted to account for the context of social networking sites.įrequent and excessive alcohol use are important problems in today’s Western society, especially among adolescents and young adults.

These findings suggest that there is a lot to be concerned about in this context, especially since many minors can be exposed to influencers’ alcoholposts, potentially leading to increased drinking among this vulnerable age group. A post hoc additional study that focused solely on minors confirmed these conclusions. (4) Posts with sponsorship disclosures yielded fewer likes and comments than posts without such disclosures. (3) Although a fair amount of alcoholposts (19.5%) showed a clear alcohol brand, only a few of these posts disclosed this as an advertisement, and even fewer gave an educational slogan (i.e., “#no18noalcohol”). (2) Alcoholposts were positive, showed a social context, and were mostly posted by lifestyle influencers. (1) The majority of influencers (i.e., 63.5%) posted about alcohol recently. In a content analysis of Instagram posts of 178 popular influencers, we investigated: (1) how many and how often influencers post about alcohol, (2) what type of influencers post about alcohol, (3) what the characteristics of influencers’ alcoholposts are, and (4) to what extent these alcoholposts are commercialized (e.g., by showing brands and sponsorship disclosures). Furthermore, because by using influencers alcohol brands may have found a way to circumvent regulations that prohibit advertising for minors, it is important to understand whether alcohol brands are visible in influencers’ posts and whether influencers use disclosures (e.g., “#ad”) to notify viewers. Because social influencers (i.e., individuals with the potential to influence large audiences on social media) may have a strong influence on young people, it is important to know whether and how often they post about alcohol. Research has shown that young people post a lot of alcohol-related posts (i.e., alcoholposts) on social media and these posts have been shown to increase drinking behaviors. 4Institute of Psychology, Health, Medical and Neuropsychology Unit, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands.3European Centre for Monitoring Alcohol Marketing, Utrecht, Netherlands.2Dutch Institute for Alcohol Policy STAP, Utrecht, Netherlands.1Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Hanneke Hendriks 1*, Danii Wilmsen 1, Wim van Dalen 2,3 and Winifred A.

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