About

Why Canary?

The internet offers new avenues for harmful information and harmful products to be promoted directly to consumers—including children. This unprecedented access has posed a significant challenge to health policymakers.

Canary is a digital media monitoring service that uses expert-led, AI-powered scraping and analysis to map the digital forces that influence global health. Originally designed to track the promotion of tobacco, alcohol and soda marketing online, Canary provides the data intelligence needed to navigate the digital environments where modern health decisions are made—so that public health leaders can react strategically to new trends and threats.

These results translate into action. As a result of Canary’s reporting, millions of children are being protected by new policies designed to block advertisements for addictive substances, and enforcement actions to take down harmful content.



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Methodology

Leading public health experts harness the efficiency of AI to offer scalable monitoring of harmful digital marketing content.

  1. Canary continuously scans tens of thousands of news articles and social media posts and flags potentially harmful content.
  2. Our researchers review and validate the findings to identify problematic content and emerging trends.
  3. We compile our insights and share them with public health advocates, policy makers, NGOs, tech partners, and other stakeholders to support timely, evidence-based action.
Technical Appendix

Canary History

Canary began in India in 2019 as a Facebook page that crowdsourced user-submitted instances of tobacco marketing. As an extension to the Facebook campaign, Vital Strategies launched Canary to scale capacity and reach. After receiving enthusiastic support, Canary expanded into Indonesia and Mexico, protecting millions from harmful tobacco advertising. Beginning in 2024, we also began working with partners in Brazil and China.

The Canary model was designed to scale quickly and be applied across sectors, such as ultra-processed foods and sugary drinks. In 2025, Canary will begin reporting on online alcohol marketing in partnership with RESET Alcohol, adding South Africa and the Philippines to our focus countries.

Canary is a project of Vital Strategies, a leading global public health organization. To learn more about our work, please visit the Vital Strategies website.

Canary by Vital Strategies is a first-of-its-kind service that monitors and reports cases of online addictive product marketing to support the introduction, strengthening and enforcement of public health policies.

Vital Strategies
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