AI Bots Flooded UK Vape Consultation With 90,835 Fake Responses, Study Finds
A study published in Tobacco Control has found that 90,835 of the 118,756 responses to the UK government's 2023 consultation on tobacco and vaping legislation were identified by the Department of Health and Social Care as fraudulent, in what researchers describe as the first documented instance of large-scale automated interference in a formal UK public health policy consultation.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Bath analysed the consultation's response data and found that nearly all of the bot-generated submissions opposed the proposed restrictions on disposable vape sales — a coordinated push that, had it gone undetected, would have materially distorted the apparent public mandate against the policy.
After the fraudulent responses were excluded, 79.6% of valid respondents supported the proposed restrictions, a margin that points in the opposite direction to the message the automated campaign appeared designed to send.
The researchers said the volume and the consistency of the submissions suggested a coordinated campaign, but that they could not establish who organised it or what its precise objective was.
The consultation covered plans including a ban on disposable vapes and the creation of a smoke-free generation policy, and its response data fed directly into the legislative process that produced the UK's Tobacco and Vapes Act.
Caroline Cerny, deputy chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, called for safeguards against the use of technology to manipulate public consultations, warning that without detection systems, future policy processes could be steered by machine-generated volume rather than genuine public input.
The findings land as governments worldwide increasingly consult the public through digital channels — the same channels that generative AI has made cheap to flood. For regulators in the nicotine space, where industry, advocacy and consumer groups all campaign hard online, the study suggests consultation integrity now requires the same forensic validation applied to election and disinformation defenses.
[Reference]
- Tobacco Reporter (original report) — https://tobaccoreporter.com/2026/10/28/study-says-ai-bots-flooded-uk-tobacco-and-vape-consultation
- The Guardian coverage (Oct. 27, 2026) — https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/oct/27/ai-bots-flooded-2023-uk-government-consultation-disposable-vapes-ban
- BMJ coverage — https://www.bmj.com/content/395/bmj-2026-101264