The European Union has recently implemented stringent regulations aimed at preventing social media platforms from engaging in targeted advertising toward children. However, a recent investigation into TikTok has uncovered a significant oversight. Teenagers continue to be exposed to highly personalized commercial content, cleverly disguised within ordinary posts.
The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) explicitly prohibits the profiling of minors for advertising purposes. Nevertheless, the legislation offers a restrictive definition of “advertisements,” encompassing only those “formal” ads directly purchased through a platform’s proprietary advertising system. This leaves influencer marketing and promotional videos that lack clear disclosure largely unaddressed.
Investigating TikTok’s Algorithmic Feed
To gauge the real-world implications of this legislative gap, Sára Soľárová from the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Slovakia, along with her research team, utilized automated accounts, or “sock puppets.” These simulated 16- to 17-year-old teenagers and 20- to 21-year-old adults on TikTok. The bots were imbued with specific interests, including beauty, fitness, and gaming. Over a ten-day period, they were programmed to engage with TikTok’s “For You” algorithmic feed for one hour daily.
“The only way for us as a society to understand social media is to study it behaviourally, and this is the way we do it,” Soľárová stated, explaining the methodology behind the study.
A Flood of Undisclosed Commercial Content
During the experiment, the simulated users viewed a total of 7,095 videos. Approximately 19 percent of these videos contained some form of advertisement. Crucially, of these advertising videos, around 56 percent were undisclosed. This means creators and brands promoted products without utilizing the mandatory disclosure labels required by the platform.
The exposure to formal, platform-purchased advertisements directed at the minor accounts was markedly limited, and in some instances, entirely absent. These ads also showed no indications of personalized targeting. In stark contrast, the overwhelming majority of commercial content encountered by the simulated teenagers fell into the undisclosed category.
Targeted Interests, Hidden Agendas
These clandestine advertisements were aggressively tailored to the inferred interests of the teenage users. For example, one simulated 16-year-old girl, who exhibited an interest in beauty products, was shown undisclosed ads where 92.1 percent of the content specifically matched that interest through algorithmic recommendation.
Researchers discovered that this covert profiling of minors was significantly more potent, exhibiting a targeting intensity five to eight times stronger than what is permitted for formal adult advertising. This was measured by the disparity between how frequently an ad aligned with a user’s interests and its prevalence for an average user. This distinction holds substantial weight, considering that undisclosed ads constituted the vast majority of advertisements viewed by minors: 84 percent of ads they encountered were undisclosed, compared to 49 percent for adult users.
A Legal Loophole Exploited
“Formally, TikTok complies with the law because it does not profile the formal ads to minors,” Soľárová explained. “On that note, TikTok is doing everything it can. But… the disclosed ads represent a small proportion of the total commercial content on the app.” TikTok elected not to provide comment for this report.
Catalina Goanta, based at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, described these undisclosed advertisements as a novel form of targeted marketing. She noted that by leveraging consumer preferences to infer preferred content, platforms can seamlessly integrate a greater volume of commercial messaging.
Expanding the Definition of Advertising
Goanta advocates for shared responsibility, extending to a wider array of regulatory bodies. “Influencer marketing has been traditionally understood very narrowly by regulators. Ads that are not disclosed are a harm to consumers,” she stated. Soľárová concurred, emphasizing the need for broader legislative scope: “We have to expand the definition of what advertising is.”