Illegal loot box advertising on social media: an empirical study using the Meta and TikTok ad transparency repositories

Background: Loot boxes are gambling-like products inside video games that can be bought with real-world money to obtain random rewards. They are widely available to children, and stakeholders are concerned about potential harms, e.g., overspending. According to the Advertising Standards Authority, UK advertising must disclose, if relevant, that a game contains (i) any in-game purchases and (ii) loot boxes specifically. Our previous research found that app store listings are often non-compliant. However, it is not known whether video game advertising on social media (which represents highly popular channels) is compliant or not.

Methods: Reviewing social media advertising posts, images, and videos to identify whether the relevant, legally-required disclosures were made. An empirical examination of relevant adverts on Meta-owned platforms (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger) and TikTok was conducted. On Meta, this focused on 187 recent adverts of 63 popular games. On TikTok, the 130 most viewed video game adverts were reviewed.

Results: Only about 7% of advertising disclosed loot box presence. The vast majority of social media advertising (93%) was therefore non-compliant with UK advertising regulations and also EU consumer protection law. In the UK alone, the 93 most viewed TikTok adverts failing to disclose loot box presence were watched 292,641,000 times total or approximately 10 impressions per active user.

Conclusions: Many people have therefore been repeatedly exposed to prohibited and socially irresponsible advertising that failed to provide important and mandated information. This study is the first to rely on ad transparency repositories (required by the EU Digital Services Act) to obtain objective data. How data access empowered by law can and should be used by researchers is practically demonstrated. Future gambling research should take advantage of such advertising platforms. Policymakers should consider enabling more such opportunities for the public benefit.