New Social Campaign to End Indoor Tanning

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By: Jessica Cherok

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) wants teens to stop using tanning beds, and they’re taking to social media to spread the word.

The agency plans on spending over half a million dollars on a social media campaign to educate teens’ mothers on the dangers of tanning salons. Project “Likes, Pins, and Views: Engaging Moms on Teen Indoor Tanning Thru Social Media” will be targeted toward Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest users who are parents of teenage girls.

According to the NIH, “Indoor tanning (IT) increases the risk of melanoma and many states have passed policies to restrict access to IT facilities by minors to reduce the rate of melanoma. A social media campaign will be delivered to mothers with adolescent daughters designed to convince them not to allow their daughters to indoor tan in a state where IT restrictions have an exception for parental consent.”

While some states require parental consent for anyone under the age of 18 to use indoor tanning facilities, some states do not. The NIH campaign will specifically target those states in an effort toward “reducing mothers’ permissiveness for IT by adolescent daughters.”

The campaign will run on social media for the next two school years, with a goal of complete banning of indoor tanning for teens.