TikTok’s unpublished skirt ads prohibit profiling of minors

The European Union recently introduced strict laws to prevent social media platforms from targeting children with personalized ads. But the TikTok study reveals a huge gap: teens are still bombarded with highly targeted commercial content disguised as everyday posts.

The EU Digital Services Act (DSA) expressly prohibits the profiling of minors for advertising purposes. However, the legislation defines “advertisements” narrowly and includes only “formal” advertisements purchased directly through the platform’s own advertising system. It largely ignores influencer marketing and unpublished promotional videos.

To see how it works in practice, Sára Soľárová at the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Slovakia and her colleagues deployed automated sock puppet accounts on TikTok that simulated 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 run through the TikTok For You algorithm 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 the way we do it,” says Soľárová.

In total, bots watched 7,095 videos during that period, 19 percent of which contained some kind of ad. Of these video ads, approximately 56 percent were unpublished ads, where creators and brands promote products without using the platform’s required information labels.

The formal ads purchased on the platform served to smaller accounts were limited – and in some cases none at all – and showed no signs of personalized targeting. But the vast majority of commercial content the simulated teenagers encountered fell into the undisclosed category.

These hidden ads were aggressively tailored to the inferred interests of teens. For example, when a simulated 16-year-old girl expressed an interest in beauty, 92.1 percent of the unpublished ads algorithmically served to her explicitly matched that interest.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 difference between how often the ad matched the user’s interests and how often it was shown to the average user. This matters because unpublished ads made up the vast majority seen by minors: 84 percent of the ads they encountered were unpublished, compared to 49 percent for adults.

“Formally, TikTok complies with the law because it does not target minors with formal advertisements,” says Soľárová. “In this context, TikTok is doing everything it can. But… the ads posted represent a small portion of the overall commercial content on the app.” TikTok declined to comment for this story.

“These unpublished ads are a new form of targeted advertising: by using consumer preferences to infer the type of content they see, platforms are able to seamlessly deliver more commercial content,” he says Catalina Goanta at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Goanta believes that responsibility must be shared by a wider range of authorities, including regulators. “Influencer marketing has traditionally been viewed very narrowly by regulators. Ads that are not published harm consumers,” he says. Soľárová repeats this point: “We need to expand the definition of what advertising is.”

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