The DSA's Blind Spot: Algorithmic Audit of Advertising and Minor Profiling on TikTok

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05653v1
• Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:02:48 GMT
• Title: The DSA's Blind Spot: Algorithmic Audit of Advertising and Minor Profiling on TikTok
• Abstract summary: Article 28(2) of the Digital Service Act (DSA) prohibits profiling-based advertising to minors.<n>We provide the first empirical evidence of how this definitional gap operates in practice through an algorithmic audit of TikTok.<n>We argue that protecting minors requires expanding the regulatory definition of advertisement to encompass brand/influencer marketing.
• Score: 4.14469104236667
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Adolescents spend an increasing amount of their time in digital environments where their still-developing cognitive capacities leave them unable to recognize or resist commercial persuasion. Article 28(2) of the Digital Service Act (DSA) responds to this vulnerability by prohibiting profiling-based advertising to minors. However, the regulation's narrow definition of "advertisement" excludes current advertising practices including influencer marketing and promotional content that serve functionally equivalent commercial purposes. We provide the first empirical evidence of how this definitional gap operates in practice through an algorithmic audit of TikTok. Our approach deploys sock-puppet accounts simulating a pair of minor and adult users with distinct interest profiles. The content recommended to these users is automatically annotated, enabling systematic statistical analysis across four video categories: containing formal, disclosed, undisclosed and none advertisement; as well as advertisement topical relevance to user's interest. Our findings reveal a stark regulatory paradox. TikTok demonstrates formal compliance with Article 28(2) by shielding minors from profiled formal advertisements, yet both disclosed and undisclosed ads exhibit significant profiling aligned with user interests (5-8 times stronger than for adult formal advertising). The strongest profiling emerges within undisclosed commercial content, where brands/creators fail to label promotional content/paid partnership and the platform neither corrects this omission nor prevents its personalized delivery to minors. We argue that protecting minors requires expanding the regulatory definition of advertisement to encompass brand/influencer marketing and extending the Article 28(2) prohibition accordingly, ensuring that commercial content cannot circumvent protections merely by operating outside formal advertising channels.

Related papers

• Into the Unknown: Accounting for Missing Demographic Data when Mitigating Ad Delivery Skew [2.904614754159118]
  Online advertising platforms use algorithmic systems to power the process of matching ads to users, termed ad delivery.<n>Prior audits have demonstrated that ad delivery can be skewed by demographic attributes.<n>This under-delivery raises a serious concern in the context of ads promoting public services.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-12T15:36:21Z)
• Paid to Look Like Truth: The Prevalence and Dark Patterns of Advertorials in News Outlets [1.9827599081330742]
  We conduct the first large-scale and systematic study of advertorials.<n>We find that advertorials appear in 1 out of 3 news sites, including some of the most popular and credible outlets worldwide.<n>We highlight that legal disclaimers intended to inform users of the promotional nature of the content, are often deliberately obscured or difficult to recognize.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-13T10:43:50Z)
• External Evaluation of Discrimination Mitigation Efforts in Meta's Ad Delivery [47.418845064441605]
  We show that the Variance Reduction System (VRS) implemented by Meta does not meaningfully improve access to opportunities for individuals.<n>We then conduct experiments to evaluate VRS with real-world ads, and show that while VRS does reduce variance, it also raises advertiser costs.<n>We show our approach outperforms VRS by both increasing ad exposure for users from all groups and reducing cost to advertisers.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-06-19T19:29:26Z)
• On the Use of Proxies in Political Ad Targeting [49.61009579554272]
  We show that major political advertisers circumvented mitigations by targeting proxy attributes. Our findings have crucial implications for the ongoing discussion on the regulation of political advertising.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-18T17:15:13Z)
• Advertiser Content Understanding via LLMs for Google Ads Safety [9.376815457907195]
  This study proposes a method to understand advertiser's intent for content policy violations, using Large Language Models (LLMs) We generate advertiser's content profile based on multiple signals from their ads, domains, targeting info, etc. After minimal prompt tuning our method was able to reach 95% accuracy on a small test set.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-10T00:57:51Z)
• Why am I Still Seeing This: Measuring the Effectiveness Of Ad Controls and Explanations in AI-Mediated Ad Targeting Systems [55.02903075972816]
  We evaluate the effectiveness of Meta's "See less" ad control and the actionability of ad targeting explanations following the shift to AI-mediated targeting. We find that utilizing the "See less" ad control for the topics we study does not significantly reduce the number of ads shown by Meta on these topics. We find that the majority of ad targeting explanations for local ads made no reference to location-specific targeting criteria.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-21T18:03:11Z)
• A Multimodal Analysis of Influencer Content on Twitter [40.41635575764701]
  Line between personal opinions and commercial content promotion is frequently blurred. This makes automatic detection of regulatory compliance breaches related to influencer advertising difficult. We introduce a new Twitter (now X) dataset consisting of 15,998 influencer posts mapped into commercial and non-commercial categories.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-09-06T15:07:23Z)
• Discrimination through Image Selection by Job Advertisers on Facebook [79.21648699199648]
  We propose and investigate the prevalence of a new means for discrimination in job advertising. It combines both targeting and delivery -- through the disproportionate representation or exclusion of people of certain demographics in job ad images. We use the Facebook Ad Library to demonstrate the prevalence of this practice.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-13T03:43:58Z)
• Exploring the Online Micro-targeting Practices of Small, Medium, and Large Businesses [0.0]
  The European Commission plans to restrict or ban some targeting functionalities in the new European Democracy Action Plan act. We take a first step by understanding who is advertising on Facebook and how they use the targeting functionalities. We found that only 32% of small and medium-sized businesses and 30% of large-sized businesses micro-target at least one of their ads.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-07-19T14:16:54Z)
• Auditing for Discrimination in Algorithms Delivering Job Ads [70.02478301291264]
  We develop a new methodology for black-box auditing of algorithms for discrimination in the delivery of job advertisements. Our first contribution is to identify the distinction between skew in ad delivery due to protected categories such as gender or race. Second, we develop an auditing methodology that distinguishes between skew explainable by differences in qualifications from other factors. Third, we apply our proposed methodology to two prominent targeted advertising platforms for job ads: Facebook and LinkedIn.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-04-09T17:38:36Z)
• Do Interruptions Pay Off? Effects of Interruptive Ads on Consumers Willingness to Pay [79.9312329825761]
  We present the results of a study designed to measure the impact of interruptive advertising on consumers willingness to pay for products bearing the advertiser's brand. Our results contribute to the research on the economic impact of advertising, and introduce a method of measuring actual (as opposed to self-reported) willingness to pay in experimental marketing research.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-14T09:26:57Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.