Protecting our health online
“These platforms can use powerful data analytics to target audiences... It’s being called the digital determinants of health”
Kids, young people and parents should be aware of the strategies online advertisers use to normalise unhealthy eating patterns. We should all demand a more healthy digital environment.
Our work supports ongoing calls for a ban on junk food advertising online.
Why this matters
The health, wellbeing and safety of Australians is influenced by what they see online, especially through social media, where sophisticated campaigns are closely targeted to user’s demographic information. We need to be able to answer: Why am I seeing these ads?
The Australian Government has been investigating whether we should ban unhealthy food advertising online, and how it could work. In the United Kingdom, a ban on unhealthy food and drink advertising online will start in October 2025.
Facebook advertising, and the dark arts of its algorithms, are hard to monitor because the ads are ephemeral, but the Australian Ad Observatory captures the patterns and makes the personalising strategies observable and accountable
Our impact
Through our collaborative project The Australian Ad Observatory, we recently investigated targeted junk-food ads on Facebook in Australia. The Ad Observatory has created the world’s largest known collection of the targeted ads people encounter on Facebook.
Our 1,909 volunteers have donated 328,107 unique ads from their social media feeds. This gives researchers an unprecedented opportunity to examine what ads Australians see on social media and how they are being targeted.
We searched the database for ads promoting the top-selling unhealthy food and drink brands. These are “discretionary” or “sometimes” foods that tend to be high in fats and sugars. They include fast-food meals, confectionery, sugary drinks and snacks (to identify unhealthy food and drink categories, we used government guidance on healthy food and drinks).
Our study found that unhealthy food and drinks are promoted in ways designed to appeal to parents and carers of children, and children themselves. Additionally, young men in our study were being targeted by fast-food ads. Kids, young people and parents should be aware of the strategies online advertisers use to normalise unhealthy eating
patterns.
The Ad Observatory team is also working on alcohol, gambling and scam advertising online, and the MLS team is also working on greenwashing online with the Consumer Policy Research Centre. The Australian Ad Observatory is a flagship project of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. It is a collaboration
between MLS, QUT, The University of Queensland, Monash University and RMIT with other researchers and community organisations.
Researcher
