The European Union has enacted rigorous regulations that ban social media platforms from delivering targeted advertising to children. Nevertheless, a recent investigation into TikTok has uncovered a significant loophole: teens are still subjected to targeted commercial content misleadingly presented as ordinary posts.

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) strictly forbids profiling minors for advertising. However, the law restrictively defines “advertising,” only addressing “official” ads directly purchased through the platform’s advertising network. Consequently, influencer marketing and unlisted promotional videos largely escape scrutiny.

To investigate this issue, Sarah Sojalova and researchers from Slovakia’s Kempelen Institute for Intelligent Technology created automated accounts that simulated teenagers aged 16-17 and adults aged 20-21. The bots, programmed with specific interests such as beauty, fitness, and gaming, were tasked to browse TikTok’s algorithmically-generated For You feed for one hour a day over the course of ten days.

“Understanding social media behaviorally is essential for our society, and this is how we achieve it,” Sojalova states.

Throughout the simulation, the bot viewed a total of 7,095 videos, 19% of which contained some form of advertisement. Notably, around 56% of these ads were unreleased, where creators and brands promoted products without adhering to the platform’s mandated disclosure labels.

Official ads delivered to minor accounts were minimal or entirely absent, with no sign of personalized targeting. However, most commercial content encountered by the simulated teens categorized as undisclosed advertising.

These hidden ads were actively customized to align with the presumed interests of teenagers. For instance, if a simulated 16-year-old girl expressed a preference for beauty, 92.1% of the unpublished ads presented to her by the algorithm resonated with those interests.

Overall, the study indicated that covert profiling of minors was five to eight times more effective than the extent of targeting permitted in formal adult advertising, as measured by the disparity between how often ads aligned with a user’s interests and how frequently they were shown to the average user. Crucially, the majority of ads viewed by minors were unpublished: 84% of ads seen by minors fell into this category, in contrast to 49% for adults.

“Though TikTok technically complies with the law by not officially advertising to minors, it still allows an overwhelming amount of non-disclosed commercial content,” Sojalova remarked. “TikTok is doing its utmost in this respect. However, published ads account for only a small segment of the overall content on the app.” TikTok opted not to comment for this piece.

“These unpublished ads signify a novel form of targeted advertising. By analyzing consumer preferences to determine the content they will be exposed to, platforms can effortlessly deliver more commercial material,” asserts Catalina Goanta, a researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Goanta emphasizes the need for responsibility to be shared among a broader set of stakeholders, including regulatory bodies. “Influencer marketing is often narrowly interpreted by regulators, leading to consumer harm,” she noted. Sojalova concurs: “We must broaden the definition of what constitutes advertising.”