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Breastfeeding rates in Vietnam, and globally, remain suboptimal. A major contributor to this is the aggressive marketing of commercial milk formulas (CMF), mainly through online media. The Vietnamese Government has implemented legal measures to limit CMF marketing, but these have been difficult to enforce, because of complex online environments. We aimed to quantify the extent and nature of online violations and contradictions in various Vietnamese laws related CMF marketing over 12 months in 2022. Using a cross‐sectional study design, we used an artificial intelligence‐enabled virtual violations detector (VIVID) to monitor official websites and social media pages of 25 breastmilk substitute (BMS) merchandise and distributors, every day for 12 months in 2022. Data were summarised descriptively. We detected more than 3000 online advertisements that violated or contradicted the intent of Vietnamese laws, involving almost 7000 violations of various articles within these laws (average 9.5 violations per day). More than 700 detections were related to CMF products being registered as “supplementary foods” or similar, thereby circumventing Vietnamese CMF marketing laws, because they are not registered as “BMS products. We demonstrate the need to strengthen the design, monitoring and enforcement of existing Vietnamese laws to eliminate mothers” exposure to the exploitative digital marketing of CMF. By turning a highly resource‐intensive task into one that is, automated requiring substantially less resources, our study represents the most comprehensive in Vietnam and internationally on the extent and nature of the online marketing of BMS. VIVID can be applied worldwide to hold industry accountable for the inappropriate marketing of CMF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competing Interests: M.M. is a former Director of Breastfeeding Advocacy Australia (until June 2022). The Alive & Thrive initiative, managed by FHI Solutions, is currently funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Government of Ireland, UNICEF, and the World Bank. Staff time to write this manuscript was covered by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP50838) and the Government of Ireland to Alive & Thrive/FHI Solutions (C.C., S.C., C.M.A., P.Z., D.V.H., J.C., and R.M.). The views and opinions set out in this article represent those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the position of the funders. All other authors have no conflict of interest to declare.