NORFOLK, Va. - How often are you scrolling on social media and the next thing you know, you're on a company's website shopping or putting stuff on your "wish list?"
Adults know better than to fall for this type of advertising, but we still do — so imagine how difficult it is for kids to recognize.
New research presented by Girard Kelly, the Senior Counsel & Director of the Privacy Program at Common Sense Media, shows kids see more than 1,000 ads a day.
That's why the Federal Trade Commission is trying to see what more can be done to protect them. On Wednesday, the FTC gathered a panel of researchers, legal experts, and industry professionals to see how children are being advertised online.
They found it's mainly through what's called "stealth" or "blurred advertising." Blurred advertising is when the products being promoted are difficult to spot. For example; influencer messages that don't reveal the intent, the 'unboxing' of toys, or product placement in games and channels.
Kids are absorbing everything they see online, and depending on their age, researchers said they don't have the cognitive function to disengage. Researchers found that the digital space is much less regulated than TV.
"It makes it also very difficult to apply simple resistance strategies. For example, a television commercial is clearly distinguished from media content and you can easily avoid it by just going to another room [or] by changing the channel, but when the commercial content is embedded in the media content, you cannot use those simple strategies," said Liselot Hudders, an associate professor at Ghent University.
Kelly said Common Sense Media's research shows that on average kids aged 13 to 18 use 8.5 hours of screen media a day, kids 8 to 12 use 5.5 hours a day, and 75% of kids under 13 have their own tablets.
"I think the constant is that the industry is probably always ahead of the kids, and perhaps, it's true that many of the parents and teachers are behind, but there's a wide variation of that," said Sonia Livingstone, professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics.
So what is the solution?
Josh Blumenfeld, manager of Government Affairs and Public Policy for YouTube, was on the call and said the platform has layers: YouTube kids, Supervised Experience, and regular YouTube.
Blumenfield said, in part, it's the responsibility of the consumer to self-identify which platform is appropriate for viewing. He also said that content creators have disclosure requirements to follow.
However, skeptics argue that it's still not enough. They said creators should be penalized if they're not in compliance, and there should be more ad disclosures and, most importantly, ad literacy education for parents and kids.
It's unrealistic for parents to oversee every single thing their child does online and pre-teens, between 10-12, are still developing an understanding of persuasive intent.
Click here for a link to the conversation and to view the transcript.
