EU laws restrict advertising on TikTok aimed at children
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The European Union recently introduced strict laws to stop social media platforms from targeting children with personalized ads. But a study of TikTok reveals a massive loophole: teenagers are still bombarded with highly targeted commercial content disguised as everyday posts.
The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) expressly prohibits the profiling of minors for advertising. However, the legislation defines “ads” narrowly, covering only “formal” ads purchased directly through a platform’s own advertising system. It largely ignores influencer marketing and undisclosed promotional videos.
To see how this plays out in practice, Sára Soľárová at the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Slovakia and her colleagues deployed automated sockpuppet accounts to TikTok, simulating 16- to 17-year-old teenagers and 20- to 21-year-old adults. The bots were assigned specific interests, such as beauty, fitness or gaming, and were programmed to browse TikTok’s algorithmic For You feed for an hour a day over 10 days.
“The only way for us as a society to understand social media is to study it behaviorally, and this is the way we do it,” says Soľárová.
In total, the bots watched 7,095 videos during that period, 19 percent of which contained some form of advertising. Of those promotional videos, about 56 percent were undisclosed ads, where creators and brands push products without using the platform’s required disclosure labels.
The formal, platform-bought ads served to the smaller accounts were limited – and in some cases non-existent – and showed no signs of personalized targeting. But the vast majority of commercial content the simulated teens encountered fell into the undisclosed category.
These hidden ads were aggressively tailored to the teens’ inferred interests. For example, when a simulated 16-year-old girl showed an interest in beauty, 92.1 percent of the undisclosed ads served to her algorithmically explicitly matched that interest.
Overall, the researchers found that this covert profiling of minors was five to eight times stronger than the level of targeting allowed for formal adult advertising, as measured by the gap between how often an ad matched a user’s interests versus how often it appeared to the average user. That matters because undisclosed ads made up the vast majority of minors: 84 percent of the ads they encountered were undisclosed, compared to 49 percent for adults.
“Formally speaking, TikTok complies with the law because it does not profile the formal ads to minors,” says Soľárová. “On that note, TikTok is doing everything it can. But … the disclosed ads represent a small percentage of the total commercial content in the app.” TikTok declined to comment for this story.
“These undisclosed ads are a new form of targeted advertising: by using consumer preferences to infer the type of content they see, platforms can seamlessly deliver more commercial content,” says Catalina Goanta of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Goanta believes that responsibility must be shared by a wider range of bodies, including regulators. “Influencer marketing has traditionally been understood very narrowly by regulators. Ads that are not disclosed are harmful to consumers,” she says. Soľárová echoes this point: “We need to expand the definition of what advertising is.”
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