Preventing harmful scrolling

Some briefs are more unique than others and they break the realms of a standard agency rate card. We always love a challenge, especially one that invites us to understand a landscape that’s moving fast, requires us to map it with rigour and allows us to share the learnings that will support the wider community in a good way. 

When the initial brief came in from Liquor & Gaming NSW (which is part of the NSW Office of Responsible Gambling), they had some strong ideas of what needed to be captured. From there, we tailored the project with a methodology built specifically to support their work and help them achieve their outcomes.

What started as a request for a list of creators and some metric numbers became something else entirely; a detailed intelligence report they could use to change what was happening in the gambling space across social media platforms.

The problem

Pokies and gambling content had found a home on social media. Creators are filming pokies sessions at venues, reacting to wins, building audiences and, in some cases – promoting offshore operators whose products are illegal to market to Australians. The reach was significant. The harm potential was real.

It was confronting knowing this was happening and alarming to see the scale of it once we dove in. Dozens of creators, across multiple platforms, producing content at a high volume. A manual review of the landscape was never going to be fast enough to be useful to a regulator.

The approach

We treated this like an investigation, rather than a content audit.

We treated this like an investigation, not a content audit. It was a strange flip for us: most of our days are spent growing followers and engagement for our clients, and here, more followers and more engagement meant more potential harm. Positive sentiment wasn’t the goal. It was the warning sign.

Using social listening and influencer analytics, we mapped the creator landscape systematically, tracking reach, engagement, audience demographics, and commercial affiliations. We catalogued what people posted screenshot by screenshot, who they were reaching, and what their audiences were saying in the comments, building a bigger picture of what was actually happening in the gambling space on social media.

A manual verification layer ran throughout the process: captions, link-in-bio sections, closed captions on videos, the places where disclosures are buried or affiliations are coded. 

Automated tools can’t catch these. People can, so we did.

The findings were structured as intelligence profiles: each creator assessed for risk, evidence captured to a standard that would support regulatory review, and relationships between accounts, venues, and operators mapped visually. We built a network diagram showing how affiliate codes, shared operators, and coordinated posting patterns connected creators who might otherwise look unrelated.

The work was methodical because it had to be. This went well beyond a typical campaign report.

What we found

We didn’t know the full extent of what we’d uncovered from the outset, but as things progressed, the picture that emerged was more interconnected than the original brief anticipated.

Several creators were operating as part of coordinated affiliate networks promoting the same offshore operators, using the same referral codes, sometimes amplifying each other’s content. One network alone involved five creators working in a way that looked organic but wasn’t.

Audience data showed a disproportionate reach into the 13–16 age bracket across multiple accounts. In the context of Australia’s social media laws and the under-16 access ban that came into force in December 2025, this was a real risk impacting the future of young Australians.

Some content was filmed at specific NSW venues in ways that potentially implicated those venues under the Gaming Machines Act. Others were promoting operators that fall under ACMA jurisdiction – a separate regulatory pathway that needed to be clearly identified in the report.

The impact

The report was delivered and presented to L&GNSW and the Office of Responsible Gambling. Their response made clear it had landed where it needed to.

The findings went well beyond our initial brief for the NSW team. L&GNSW shared the work with interstate counterparts and it has become part of an ongoing national conversation about how regulators engage with social media platforms on gambling content. The Circul8 report is now part of that coordinated response.

We delivered with far more depth than the original scope anticipated because the methodology held together, we put in the meticulous hours to get it right and we looked at ways to display the information visually so anyone who picked up the report could understand what was happening in the space easily.

Why this kind of work matters

Gambling harm doesn’t announce itself.

It accumulates through the normalisation of pokies as entertainment, in affiliate codes framed as tips between friends, in content filmed at venues that’s really an ad for an offshore operator. The communities most affected are often those with the least access to information about the risks.

Regulatory agencies are doing important work to address this. Our job was to give them better intelligence to work with which required rigour, meticulous detail showing the evidence and a genuine understanding of what the client needed to do next with the report. 

Our projects are tailored to reach outcomes that align with our purpose to Enrich Tomorrow. The client was happy with the results, and we’re proud of what we built here, because we know it has a real chance of making a difference in people’s lives.

This project was delivered in partnership with Liquor & Gaming NSW and the GambleAware NSW as part of their 2026 regulatory priorities.