AI RESEARCH
Auditing Engagement Incentives in the Kidfluencer Ecosystem: A Multimodal Weak Supervision Approach
arXiv CS.LG
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ArXi:2606.03173v1 Announce Type: cross 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.