European Commission Left #Unimpressed By Results Of Influencer Screening Sweep

• Published date: 03 April 2024
• Subject Matter: All Topics
• Law Firm: Osborne Clarke
• Author: Pippa Smith

Who: The European Commission and the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network

Where: European Union (EU)

When: 14 February 2024

Law stated as at: 8 March 2024

What happened:

The European Commission, and national consumer protection authorities from 22 Member States, Norway and Iceland have published the results of a screening sweep of 576 posts by influencers on the major social media platforms in the EU. The sweep focused on influencers in the fashion, lifestyle, beauty, food, travel, and fitness and sport sectors. The aim of the sweep was to understand whether influencers are compliantly disclosing the commercial content that they post online, in compliance with EU consumer law. It feeds into a broader programme of work under the EU's Digital Fairness fitness check, which is evaluating the adequacy of current EU consumer protection laws on digital issues such as influencer marketing, dark patterns and personalisation practices.

The results of the sweep found that only 20% of the published posts disclosed when the content was advertising. When influencers did label their posts, the sweep found that a large number of these posts were still not labelled adequately. For example, only 40% of influencers made the disclosure available throughout the entire commercial communication and just 34% made the disclosure immediately visible without the user needing to take additional steps to find out that the content was advertising (for example, by scrolling down or clicking "read more"). Many influencers were also not utilising the integrated labels that platforms provide to disclose commercial content, such as "paid partnership", and were instead applying their own wording.

The sweep also identified that the majority of the influencers surveyed were carrying out commercial...