BetXplain: An Explanation-Annotated Dataset for Detecting Manipulative Betting Advertisements on Social Media

2026-06-25

AI Summary

This study addresses the scarcity of publicly available annotated datasets for automatically identifying manipulative gambling advertisements on social media. The authors present the first dataset of gambling ads collected from Instagram and Reddit, manually labeled for manipulative and deceptive practices, accompanied by human-provided justifications for each annotation. This resource uniquely integrates classification labels with interpretable rationales, enabling the application of explainable AI methods to digital advertising regulation. The dataset supports the development of browser-based warning plugins, offers regulatory agencies tools for automated monitoring, and sheds light on how manipulative advertising strategies may adversely affect users’ mental health.

Abstract

The promotion of betting applications on social media platforms has increased significantly in recent years. Many of these advertisements use persuasive techniques that may mislead users, encourage risky behavior, and potentially influence users' mental well-being. However, research on the automated detection of manipulative and deceptive betting advertisements remains limited due to the lack of publicly available annotated datasets. In this work, we introduce a new dataset of betting-related advertisements collected from two widely used social media platforms, Instagram and Reddit. The advertisements were manually annotated for manipulative and deceptive advertising practices. In addition to classification labels, the dataset includes human-provided explanations that describe the reasoning behind each annotation, enabling research into explainable approaches to detecting manipulative advertising. Furthermore, we analyze the strategies commonly used in betting advertisements and examine how these persuasive tactics may impact users' mental health. The proposed framework can also enable practical applications such as browser plugins that warn users about manipulative betting advertisements and automated web crawlers that help regulatory authorities monitor and detect such promotions online.

Problem

• manipulative advertising
• betting advertisements
• social media
• deceptive content
• annotated dataset

Innovation

• explanation-annotated dataset
• manipulative advertising detection
• explainable AI
• social media monitoring
• betting advertisement analysis