Is This An Ad?: Automatically Disclosing Online Endorsements On YouTube With AdIntuition

Undisclosed online endorsements on social media can be misleading to users who may not know when viewed content contains advertisements. Despite federal regulations requiring content creators to disclose online endorsements, studies suggest that less than 10% do so in practice. To overcome this issue, we need knowledge of how to best detect online endorsements, knowledge about how prevalent online endorsements are in the wild, and ways to design systems to automatically disclose advertising content to viewers. To that end, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a tool called AdIntuition which automatically discloses when YouTube videos contain affiliate marketing, a type of social media endorsement. We evaluated AdIntuition with 783 users using a survey, field deployment, and diary study. We discuss our findings and recommendations for future measurements of and tools to detect and alert users about affiliate marketing content.