Smoke-Free Screens Now Recruiting

Are you between 14-24 and enjoy watching movies? Know someone who does? Then keep reading! Our Smoke-Free Screens program is recruiting new volunteers to review movies for tobacco content.

Smoke-Free Screens is a data-collection partnership between Breathe California and Truth Initiative that examines the presence of commercial tobacco products across different media, including movies, TV shows, social media, music videos, and YouTube. This project is designed to raise awareness about the impact that tobacco content within media has on youth and young adults, while putting pressure on production companies to make changes on-screen. Our Smoke-Free Screens volunteer movie reviewers are a key part of this program, as they collect all the data for the project.

What do the movie reviewers do? Once a month, all our movie reviewers join a virtual meeting to sign up to review any movies coming out that are projected to hit the top 10 at the box office. Movie reviewers then let Breathe staff know which theater and what time they’d like to see the movie. Breathe staff sends out the tickets and review forms to reviewers and reviewers go watch the movie! They then complete the review form and Breathe staff input the data into a public database that anyone can use to check if there is tobacco content in a movie or TV show check that out here.

Reducing or eliminating tobacco content from media is a critical issue as research shows that young people are more than 3X more likely to start vaping when exposed to tobacco imagery in popular streaming and TV shows and higher exposure to smoking in movies makes youth 2X more likely to use tobacco. We have seen major improvements in the amount of tobacco on screens (depictions of tobacco decreased on Netflix by 76% from 2020 to 2021), but the fight is far from over and we need your help to finish it!

Email smokefreescreens@gmail.com for more information or visit our website https://sacbreathe.org/what-we-do/tobacco/thumbs-up-thumbs-down/