According to the Chosun Ilbo report on December 22, the Korea Health Promotion and Development Institute released data that last year among the 14 popular dramas on five major OTT (online video service) platforms such as Netflix, only four did not contain smoking scenes in the entire drama. However, the total frequency of smoking scenes in the remaining 10 dramas reached 142 times.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare of South Korea announced the "Guidelines for the Production and Broadcasting of Smoking Prevention Media for Children and Adolescents" on December 22 to deal with the impact of excessive smoking scenes in OTT content on young people. The issuance of this regulation mainly improves the formulation and broadcast of smoking content on media platforms such as OTT and Youtube to protect children and teenagers. Specific contents include: not indirectly or directly promoting smoking, controlling the frequency of scenes of celebrities smoking, not using expressions that may make people think smoking is harmless or less harmful, not showing smoking in content for children and teenagers, etc.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare also stated that “up to 44% of teenagers start smoking because of seeing smoking scenes in the media. The more smoking scenes children see, the higher the likelihood that they will start using e-cigarettes. The likelihood is three times that of ordinary teenagers.” Therefore, the Ministry of Welfare recommends that when producing OTT content and web comics, it is necessary to control the exposure of smoking products and depict smoking scenes.
A source from the Ministry of Health and Welfare said, "Recent scenes of smoking in OTT content have reached serious levels."
For example, the protagonist in the Netflix series "Glory" often has a cigarette in his mouth, while the Tving series "Drunk City Girl" has a scene where a teacher lectures a smoking student but instead borrows a cigarette to smoke. Currently, TV dramas and broadcasts are subject to the Broadcasting Act that states that they should avoid glorifying or promoting smoking, but OTT content is only subject to the regulations on harmful sites and illegal information distribution in the Information and Communications Network Act, so smoking scenes can be shown freely.
