Addressing the accountability gap: gambling advertising and social media platform responsibilities

Abstract

This commentary reports on gambling advertisements served to Australians on Facebook in 2021-2022 that we discovered through a research project that uses novel data donation infrastructure to improve the observability of platform-based advertising. Preliminary findings show that advertisements for online casinos appear on social media and are served to people tagged as located in Australia despite laws that prohibit both the operation and advertising of these gambling services in Australia, and in apparent contravention of company policies that require gambling advertisers to follow applicable law. We outline the harms of normalizing gambling on digital media and argue that the limited accountability of digital platforms for online advertising can contribute to these harms. We suggest ways in which the law and its enforcement and platform responsibility can be reformed to prevent harmful gambling advertising.

Keywords:

• Online advertising
• gambling advertisements
• online casinos
• Facebook
• social media
• regulation of advertising

Disclosure statement

Burgess has consulted with Meta in an advisory capacity as a member of the Asia Pacific Expert Circle on misinformation and content ranking.

Ethical statement

The project (including the deployment of the plugin) was approved by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Human Research Ethics Committee (approval number: 4555) and was also ratified by the ethics committees of other ADM + S Center Participating Organizations involved in the project.

The research observations discussed here informed independent reporting by Casey Briggs and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in March 2023: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-21/illegal-online-gambling-facebook-meta-casino/102118408.

Notes

1 See brief description of Australia’s Interactive Gambling Act 2001 at text accompanying notes 6 to 8 below.

2 https://projects.propublica.org/facebook-ads/

3 https://adobservatory.org/

4 Full information including code for the plugin available at https://www.admscentre.org.au/adobservatory/ and https://github.com/ADMSCentre/australian-ad-observatory

5 https://www.acma.gov.au/blocked-gambling-websites

6 Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth) s 5.

7 Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth) ss 15, 15AA.

8 Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth) s61EA.

9 See: https://www.acma.gov.au/investigations-online-gambling-providers For reporting of blocking of websites in 4th quarter 2021, see https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2022-02/report/action-interactive-gambling-october-december-2021

10 Telecommunications Act 1997 (Cwth), ss 312, 313.

11 https://www.acma.gov.au/blocked-gambling-websites

12 Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth) s61EA(3).

13 See Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (US).

14 Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 on a Single Market For Digital Services (Digital Services Act), Recital 22, Article 9, 16. Available from: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/

15 Digital Services Act Recital 95, Article 39.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported by the Australian Research Council through the ARC Center of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (CE200100005) (ADM + S). It has also been supported by the QUT Digital Media Research Center. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a Partner Organization of the ADM + S.