AI bots flooded UK consultation on disposable vapes ban, study finds

A government consultation on banning disposable vapes was flooded with tens of thousands of fake responses generated by AI bots, according to research reported by The Guardian. The attempt to stop the ban failed: officials removed the automated submissions, and the ban later became law.

What happened

In 2023, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) ran a public consultation on what became the tobacco and vapes bill. The government called the plan the “smoke free generation” policy. The Guardian reports that three-quarters of all responses were machine-generated, in what is thought to be the first coordinated attempt to use AI to derail health policymaking in the UK.

The findings were published on Tuesday in the journal Tobacco Control. The authors are two health policy experts: Dr Nason Maani of the University of Edinburgh and Prof Anna Gilmore of the University of Bath. They describe the episode as what “appears to be the first documented instance of large-scale automated interference in a formal public health policy consultation”.

The DHSC used bot-detection methods and found that 90,835 of the 118,756 responses it received, or 76%, came from bots. All but two of those automated responses answered the same question. They opposed the plan by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government to ban disposable vapes. According to the DHSC, the submissions were “often duplicated many times and sent at high frequency from a small number of IP addresses”.

The department excluded all 90,835 automated responses from its decision-making. Keir Starmer’s Labour government inherited the bill in 2024 and passed it into law, including the ban on businesses selling or supplying disposable vapes.

The research does not say who was behind the campaign. Caroline Cerny, deputy chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, said the evidence was “deeply concerning”. She added: “Given the tobacco industry’s history of seeking to undermine public health regulation, we need to be alert to the risk that technological advances can be used to further commercial interests around health policy and put safeguards in place.”

Why it matters if you live in United Kingdom

Public consultations are one of the main ways ordinary residents can comment on new laws and regulations before they are decided. You do not need to be a British citizen or registered to vote to respond, so they are one of the few formal channels open to many internationals living in the UK. If consultations can be swamped with fake submissions, real responses carry less weight.

Azzurra Moores, associate director for information ecosystems at the thinktank Demos, put it this way: “Public consultations are one of the main ways government opens up its decision-making, so any interference with them is a serious concern.” She called the findings “pretty alarming”, adding that “if a consultation can be swamped like this, it stops telling policymakers what the public actually thinks and undermines trust in the process.”

Dr Maani warned that the risk goes beyond this one case. “The threat is that future campaigns become harder to catch, and what we can’t catch, we don’t know about,” he said. “Such campaigns are a threat because they raise the possibility of a handful of powerful interests looking like a mass movement.”

For consumers, the practical result is unchanged. The ban on businesses selling or supplying disposable vapes is law, and the bot campaign did not affect that outcome. What the research shows is that the process behind a major health law was targeted. That matters for anyone who wants future decisions on issues such as health, housing or the environment to reflect what residents really think.

Moores also pointed to a trade-off that could affect how easy it is for genuine people to take part. “Every barrier that keeps bots out also makes it harder for real people to take part, and AI makes fake responses far harder to spot,” she said. If departments add stricter checks, responding to future consultations could take more steps than it does now.

What to watch next

The DHSC says its safeguards worked. A spokesperson told The Guardian: “We always have robust controls in place to prevent the manipulation of our public consultations, and those controls worked effectively in this case.” The department said it “will remain alert to interference of this kind in future consultation processes”.

The open question is whether those controls will keep pace with the technology. Moores said interference “can adapt faster than departments can update their checks” and that while “better screening and more transparency will help, there’s no single fix.” Cerny argued that “decisions that affect public health must be based on sound evidence and expertise, not manipulated response numbers.”

Watch for whether the government changes how it verifies consultation responses, and whether it publishes more detail on how many submissions it screens out. If you plan to respond to a future consultation, expect possible new identity or verification steps. Responding in your own words, rather than copying a template, will also make your contribution easier to recognise as genuine.

Source: The Guardian