Auditing Engagement Incentives in the Kidfluencer Ecosystem: A Multimodal Weak Supervision Approach
arXiv:2606.03173v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rise of `kidfluencers' on YouTube has raised ethical concerns about child digital labor and exploitation. While emerging legislation attempts to regulate this ecosystem, empirical evidence linking exploitation to engagement remains scarce, given the difficulty of operationalizing exploitation at scale. This study presents a multimodal AI audit of 5,051 videos across 79 kidfluencer channels, using weak supervision to detect exploitation signals without large-scale manual labels. We aggregate noisy labeling functions -- including LLM-based cl
The proliferation of AI-powered auditing tools is making large-scale analysis of previously opaque social phenomena, like child digital labor, newly feasible and urgent amidst increasing public concern and emerging regulations.
This study demonstrates how AI, particularly weak supervision and LLMs, can operationalize complex ethical concepts for scaled empirical analysis, holding platforms and participants accountable in emerging digital economies.
The ability to audit and identify exploitation at scale without extensive manual labeling enables more proactive and data-driven regulation and intervention in the kidfluencer ecosystem and similar areas.
- · Child protection organizations
- · Regulatory bodies
- · Ethical AI developers
- · Academic researchers
- · Exploitative kidfluencer channels
- · Platforms failing to self-regulate content
- · Manual content moderation services
AI-driven auditing will increase pressure on social media platforms to enforce stricter guidelines and better protect child users.
The methodology could be extended to other areas of content moderation, leading to more automated detection of harmful content beyond child exploitation.
This precendent may accelerate legislative efforts for platform accountability based on AI-generated evidence, potentially impacting platform business models and content creation incentives globally.
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