Researchers analyzed over 15,500 public Instagram accounts of underage users to study trends in underage drinking. They found that underage drinking occurs most on weekends and evenings around 6pm, peaking in December and January. Underage users accounted for over a quarter of followers for major alcohol brands like Smirnoff Vodka and Heineken. The research suggests social media provides insights into underage drinking that traditional surveys cannot by analyzing photos and language that reference alcohol consumption and brands.

1. Instagram Loophole Sheds Light on Underage Drinking Trends
Chelsea Scherer
November 3, 2015
Alcohol advertising through social media is the Wild, Wild West of the marketing
industry – but without the sheriff.
Alcohol advertising through radio, television, and magazines has been a concern for
governments and public health associations for the last few decades. But take it a
step further by adding social media into the mix and you expose younger
demographics to drinking and alcohol branding.
People under the legal drinking age in the United States and
Canada expose many personal details about themselves
through social media. By monitoring their user accounts,
researchers can attempt to better understand what kind of
alcohol influences there are on social media.
That’s exactly what a team from the University of Rochester
has done with Instagram.
Using Face++, automatic face detection software, the team
analyzed selfie photos (pictures of users’ faces) to determine
This two-way
interaction between
adolescent youth
and alcohol brands
is fostered through
“liking,” “sharing,”
and “following” the
brand’sFacebook,
Twitter, and
Instagram accounts.

2. their gender, race, and age. Then, creating a database of words related to drinking
and alcohol brands they were able to sift through thousands of profiles to find
pictures that matched the keywords. Accounting for term variations, slang, and
misspellings like “wiskie,” instead of Whiskey.
They suggest that traditional methods of surveying youth for alcohol consumption is
an inadequate because the participants may not truthfully comply, the questions
may be closed-ended, or the respondents who choose to take the survey may have
different drinking habits than those who choose not to.
“I definitely think that using social media to track more young people drinking will
be a good add on to what we currently have,” says Samantha Cukier, former
researcher at the Johns Hopkins who studied the normalization of drinking in
television shows. “Tapping into whatever young people are doing, and if they're
going to be more honest with their social media, which obviously they are, you can
actually see what they're doing.”
Due to the fact that Instagram does not verify a user’s name and age
in the registration process, its platform serves as targeting ground
for alcohol brands advertising towards underage accounts.
Facebook and Twitter are different in that they have a larger adult
audience and broadcast style that may be an unattractive place for
younger users to keep their information somewhat confidential.
“We're not trying to catch a teenager drinking, rather we're trying to
figure out how widespread the problem is,” says Jiebo Luo,
researcher at the University of Rochester.
Testing the software with 1000 randomly selected public Instagram accounts they
found that the age classifier had an 80 per cent accuracy rate and a gender accuracy
rate of 93 per cent. To further reduce errors in estimating age and race, they had the
software look at multiple photos of the same person.
Discarding accounts that did not match their age demographic or text criteria, the
team was left with a data sample of more than 15,500 underage, English-speaking
users who had uploaded more than 195,000 photos associated with drinking and
alcohol.
They found that underage drinking usually occurs on evenings around 6 p.m.,
throughout the weekend, and peaking in December and January – maybe due to
time off school during prolonged holidays. The team concluded that underage
drinking is similar to the alcohol consumption of the general population.
Randomly analyzing the Instagram accounts for major alcohol brands including
Smirnoff Vodka, SKYY Vodka, Heineken, Chandon USA, and Carlsberg, they found
Exceeding more
than 400 million
user accounts
worldwide, 41 per
cent of Instagram
usersare between
the ages of 16 and
24.

3. that underage users accounted for more than one quarter of all the followers of each
brand.
The research also found that more underage females followed Smirnoff, SKYY Vodka
and Chandon USA, whereas equal amounts of underage males and females followed
Heineken and Carlsberg.
This research aligns with a survey done by the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Using online
surveys, they asked 1000 youth between the ages of 18 and
20 – under the legal drinking age in the U.S. – questions
about 900 alcohol brands. They found that some of the
country’s leading brands were heavily targeting this age
group through magazines.
“There have been about one hundred studies done around
the world and none of them think the alcohol industry's
self-regulation is working,” says David Jernigan PhD,
Director of the Center of Alcohol Marketing and Youth at
Johns Hopkins.
Jernigan says that he would like to see more social media
companies require age verification software to help
prevent this kind of targeting.
Alcohol marketing is pervasive across many social media platforms. According to
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, every day more than 4,750 youth
under the age of 16-years-old have their first drink of alcohol. And the average age
of underage drinking (between the ages of 12 and 20) begins at 16-years-old. A
2014 study done by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse found that the same
goes for Canadian youth, who also begin drinking at the age of 16-years-old.
Luo’s research team plans to continue their research by comparing it with other
methods of surveying underage drinking to create more robust correlations. In the
meantime, their findings may be valuable to governments, schools, and various
associations that handle issues surrounding underage drinking.
The alcohol brands
found to regularly
target youthinclude:
 Bud Light
 Budweiser
 Smirnoff Vodka
 Absolut Vodka
 Heineken
 BacardiMalt
 Patrón Tequila
 SKYY Vodka
 Hennessy