Tobacco use is featured far more prominently in streaming services’ shows than on broadcast and cable TV shows watched by young people, especially Netflix Inc. hits, a new report from the antismoking nonprofit Truth Initiative has found.

The report homed in on the 14 most popular shows for people between the ages of 15 and 24, analyzing the tobacco imagery in them.

Netflix NFLX, +1.28% shows, especially the popular series “Stranger Things,” stood out, according to the report.

The seven Netflix shows in the sample had 319 “tobacco incidents,” more than the seven broadcast and cable TV shows examined, which had 139 incidents among them.

“Stranger Things” — in which more than one character smokes — had the most, followed by “Orange Is the New Black” and “House of Cards,” the report said.

Netflix did not immediately return MarketWatch’s request for comment.

There is “a pervasive re-emergence of smoking imagery that is glamorizing and renormalizing a deadly habit to millions of impressionable young people,” said Robin Koval, chief executive and president of Truth Initiative. “It has to stop.”

Online streaming of TV shows has become a major trend, especially among younger viewers.

Young people are also especially vulnerable to how smoking is portrayed, the report said, with nearly all smokers taking it up before the age of 26.

And onscreen smoking does cause young people to begin smoking, the U.S. surgeon general concluded in a 2012 report after studying the depiction of smoking in movies.

There are big questions about whether tobacco companies are pushing their products through streaming services, according to the Truth Initiative report, and whether streaming companies should get state tax incentives to produce their content if it promotes smoking.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that states consider such public-health factors as smoking in making tax-subsidy decisions, the report noted.

See more: Smoking among teens has reached historic lows

Of course, streaming services aren’t the sole culprits. Nearly 80% of shows among those most popular with young people commonly show characters smoking, the report found.

“Veep” main character Selina Meyer, for example, occasionally smokes, and the detective in “Big Little Lies” plays with a cigarette while observing interrogations, the report noted.

Even “HBO’s TWX, +0.14% hit ‘Westworld,’ which is set in the future, features smoking in dramatic scenes, suggesting that even as smoking rates decline dramatically in the real world, smoking will still be normalized behavior in a future so advanced it contains fully lifelike robots,” the report said.

Cigarette makers include Altria Group Inc. MO, -1.54% , British American Tobacco BTI, -1.26% and Philip Morris International Inc. PM, -1.44% . Shares of the companies have dropped 14.8%, 14.9% and 5.2%, respectively, over the last three months, compared with a 1.1% rise in the S&P 500 SPX, +0.15% .

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Smoking is the New Black: Tobacco use is shown more on streaming shows than on cable TV