Undisclosed ads on TikTok skirt ban on profiling minors
European Union laws restrict ads on TikTok targeting children
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The European Union recently introduced strict laws to prevent social media platforms from targeting children with personalized ads. But a TikTok study reveals a huge flaw: Teens are still bombarded with highly targeted commercial content disguised as everyday messages.
The European Digital Services Act (DSA) explicitly prohibits the profiling of minors for advertising purposes. 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 translates into practice, Sára Soľárová from the Kempelen Institute of Smart Technologies in Slovakia and her colleagues deployed automated sock puppet accounts on TikTok, which simulated adolescents aged 16 to 17 and adults aged 20 to 21. The bots were assigned specific interests, such as beauty, fitness or gaming, and programmed to scroll through TikTok’s For You algorithmic feed for an hour a day for 10 days.
“The only way for us as a society to understand social media is to study it behaviorally, and that’s how we do it,” says Soľárová.
In total, the bots watched 7,095 videos during this period, 19% of which contained some sort of advertisement. Of these ad videos, approximately 56% were undisclosed ads, in which creators and brands offer products without using the disclosure labels required by the platform.
Formal ads purchased on the platform and served to minor accounts were limited – and in some cases non-existent – and showed no signs of personalized targeting. But the vast majority of commercial content encountered by simulated teens fell into the undisclosed category.
These hidden advertisements were aggressively tailored to the presumed interests of adolescents. For example, when a simulated 16-year-old girl showed an interest in beauty, 92.1% of the undisclosed ads served to her by algorithm explicitly matched that interest.
Overall, the researchers found that this covert profiling of minors was five to eight times more powerful than the level of targeting allowed for formal adult advertising, measured by the gap between how often an ad matched a user’s interests and how often it appeared to the average user. This is important because undisclosed ads make up the vast majority of ads minors saw: 84% of ads they encountered were undisclosed, compared to 49% for adults.
“Formally, TikTok respects the law because it does not show official advertisements to minors,” explains Soľárová. “On this point, TikTok is doing everything it can. But… the leaked ads represent a small proportion of the app’s total commercial content.” TikTok declined to comment for this story.
“These undisclosed ads constitute a new form of targeted advertising: by using consumers’ preferences to infer the type of content they see, platforms are able to seamlessly offer more commercial content,” explains Catalina Goanta of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Goanta believes that responsibility must be shared by more agencies, including regulators. “Influencer marketing has traditionally been understood very narrowly by regulators. Undisclosed ads harm consumers,” she says. Soľárová agrees: “We need to broaden the definition of what advertising is. »
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