Twitter Proven to be The Worst Platform for Children to Notice Gambling Adverts

Kids with Twitter accounts are getting exposure to gambling advertisements on Internet. Fake social media avatars for researchers showed heightening ad visibility to kids.

For this reason, gambling regulators have been slammed as “irresponsible”. Online based operators have received fierce criticism for doing less in order to protect children form staking advertisements.

Revelations of the Study

The UK Gambling Commission has recently been incredibly tough on kid’s access to gambling advertisements in the UK, fining firms that break these rules in record amounts. However, latest research conducted by polling form Ipsos Mori shows that some kids are gaining access to gambling adverts on social media.

Kids Sharing Staking Content

The study revealed that close to 41,000 children below the age of 16 follow gambling-related accounts on the internet and mostly on Twitter. Here, kid’s parties were discovered to have retweeted or replied to an additional 13,000 times.

All this time, gambling-related marketing and advertising have gone up by as much as 24% between the years 2015 and 2019. The total amount spent sits at around £329m ($410m) annually.

This has sparked on critics to brand regulators as “irresponsible”. While operators claim that advertisements are not exclusively targeted at kids, no sufficient action is being taken to prohibit them from viewing or engaging with the content.

Child Gambling on the Rise

The research follows recent reports of an alarming rise in problem staking among kids, with as much as fifty thousand underage persons identified as engaging in internet gaming.

Operators have reacted by giving a promise to invest in the treatment of addiction. They’re also seeking to cut down adverts on Television or to reschedule them at various times.

What this newest study highlights as a reason for concern is that kids are not guarded from seeing online staking ads by regulators who are in charge of social media accounts.

Fake profiles

Analysts at Ipsos Mori opened eleven fake social media user accounts of underage kids and wagers with addiction problems, which were grounded on browsing history. They saw that the avatar of a kid below 13 was swarmed with more internet gambling advertisement every month than the rest, with the inclusion of an adult with a gambling problem.

The report stated,

Children and young people appealing content was discovered in 11% of mainstream media staking adverts and 59% of eSports gambling content found on Twitter.”

Responsible gambling information was found to be less, most notably on Twitter. Of the 888,745 tweets studied, over nine months in 2018, the researchers discovered that only 7% had a responsible staking information

Research Ongoing

The statistics obtained will create part of lengthy research being taken by UK charity Gamble Aware, which dwells on the effects gambling adverts have on kids.

Tom Watson, The Labor Party deputy leader, quickly commented on the first findings of the study, stating:

“It’s no doubt we have many kids gambling when irresponsible staking firms are releasing adverts that look appealing to kids. The explosion of gambling advertising in recent years is increasingly fueling problem staking. If we are going to solve addiction, we need to begin by solving advertisements.”