Background:

Social media platforms have created a new advertising frontier, yet little is known about the extent to which this interactive form of advertising shapes adolescents' online relationships with unhealthy food brands.

Objective:

We aimed to understand the extent to which adolescents' preferences for Instagram food ads are shaped by the presence of comments and varying numbers of "likes." We hypothesized that adolescents would show the highest preferences for ads with more "likes" and comments. We predicted that these differences would be greater among adolescents who were "heavy social media users" (ie, >3 hours daily) vs "light social media users".

Were there any confounds in the study?Explain why or why not, and explain how you think this confound might have influenced the results of the study.