Thousands of children are being exposed to social media ads for unlicensed e-sports gambling which break advertising regulation, a new study suggests. Researchers looked at more than 800,000 tweets relating to traditional gambling, aswell as betting on e-sports – computer games tournaments played competitively. Using publicly available data, a machine-learning algorithm assessed that 41,000 accounts that interacted with these tweets likely belonged to children aged under 16. It found that children were particularly likely to respond to e-sports advertising, accounting for 28 per cent of interactions with this form of content.