BetXplain: An Explanation-Annotated Dataset for Detecting Manipulative Betting Advertisements on Social Media
This dataset addresses the lack of publicly available annotated data for detecting manipulative betting ads on social media, a problem for researchers and regulators.
The authors introduce BetXplain, a new dataset of betting advertisements from Instagram and Reddit annotated for manipulative and deceptive practices, including human-provided explanations. They analyze common persuasive strategies and their potential impact on mental health, enabling applications like browser plugins and automated monitoring.
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.