A significant minority of Dutch gambling adverts on social media illegally targeted and likely reached under-24s: Assessing compliance using Meta’s advertising repository mandated by the EU Digital Services Act

Many countries have legalised gambling participation, which has negative public health implications. Stakeholders are particularly concerned about young adults experiencing harm from rampantly advertised online gambling. The Netherlands has gradually legalised offline and, more recently, online gambling but has subsequently introduced restrictions on gambling advertising. Specifically, young adults aged between 18–23 are not allowed to be targeted with ads. The EU Digital Services Act requires major social media platforms to publish a database of all paid adverts shown and disclose which demographic groups were the intended targets and how many users were eventually reached. We systematically assessed recent ads (N = 277) and observed a reasonably high compliance rate of 92.7% amongst those published by online gambling licensee, but only 70.2% of offline licensee ads complied. A significant minority of gambling ads illegally targeted Dutch young adults under 24. The regulator should more robustly enforce the rule. Meta should also adopt platform-level changes to reduce compliance friction. We demonstrate that legally mandated data access can facilitate public scrutiny of policy implementation, enhancing accountability. The EU should ensure existing transparency obligations are enforced and consider requiring additional disclosures, whilst policymakers worldwide should adopt similar laws to enable local research capabilities.