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

Solarova, S., Mosnar, M., Tibensky, M., Jakubcik, J., Bindas, A., Liska, S., Hossner, F., Mesarcik, M., Srba, I.

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 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 across four video categories: containing formal, disclosed, undisclosed advertisement and non-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 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, so that commercial content cannot circumvent protections merely by operating outside formal advertising channels.

Cite: Sara Solarova, Matej Mosnar, Matus Tibensky, Jan Jakubcik, Adrian Bindas, Simon Liska, Filip Hossner, Matúš Mesarčík, and Ivan Srba. 2026. The DSA’s Blind Spot: Algorithmic Audit of Advertising and Minor Profiling on TikTok. In Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 4811–4835. https://doi.org/10.1145/3805689.3812355