Monitoring policy compliance and marketing practices on Geek Bars official Instagram account: content analysis

Introduction

Evidence suggests that Geek Bar is one of the leading e-cigarette brands in the USA, accounting for 15.6% of the US convenience store disposable e-cigarette market share as of September 2024.1 Prior research has documented that Geek Bar is popular among adolescents and young adults,1 and uses experiential marketing strategies, including sponsored events on Instagram.2 This study documented posts from Geek Bar’s Instagram account and evaluated compliance with platform-specific and federal tobacco marketing restrictions. Findings from this study may inform tobacco control efforts aimed at monitoring policy compliance and youth-appealing marketing practices on Instagram.

Methods

Posts were collected from Geek Bar’s Instagram profile page and its tagged page,3 using the Selenium package in Python.3 Posts made between 1 October 2024 and 1 October 2025, were retrospectively collected on 21 October 2025, representing the most recent 12-month period available. A total…

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