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

TL;DR

This paper empirically audits TikTok to reveal that minors are exposed to targeted commercial content despite regulations, due to gaps in legal definitions and platform practices.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical evidence of how current advertising practices on TikTok bypass legal protections for minors through algorithmic profiling.

Findings

TikTok complies with regulations by shielding minors from formal ads but still shows targeted commercial content.

Profiling is significantly stronger in undisclosed promotional content aimed at minors.

Creators and platforms fail to label or prevent personalized delivery of paid promotional content to minors.

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 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 paid partnerships and brand 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 matching interest profiles. The content recommended to these users is automatically annotated, enabling systematic statistical analysis. 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 creators/brands fail to label paid partnership/promotional content and the platform neither corrects this omission nor prevents its personalized delivery to minors. These results demonstrate that minors remain exposed to algorithmically targeted commercial content through the same recommendation mechanisms the DSA seeks to constrain. We argue that protecting minors requires expanding the definition of advertisement in EU law to encompass influencer and brand promotional content, and ensuring that any such expansion is accompanied by a corresponding prohibition on profiling-based targeting of minors.