Across Platforms and Languages: Dutch Influencers and Legal Disclosures on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok
This addresses the issue of legal non-disclosure in influencer marketing for regulators and platforms, but it is incremental as it applies an existing legal framework to new data.
The paper tackled the problem of inadequate disclosure of influencer marketing on social media by proposing a methodology to measure compliance with legal standards, finding that such marketing remains generally underdisclosed and that larger influencers are not more compliant.
Content monetization on social media fuels a growing influencer economy. Influencer marketing remains largely undisclosed or inappropriately disclosed on social media. Non-disclosure issues have become a priority for national and supranational authorities worldwide, who are starting to impose increasingly harsher sanctions on them. This paper proposes a transparent methodology for measuring whether and how influencers comply with disclosures based on legal standards. We introduce a novel distinction between disclosures that are legally sufficient (green) and legally insufficient (yellow). We apply this methodology to an original dataset reflecting the content of 150 Dutch influencers publicly registered with the Dutch Media Authority based on recently introduced registration obligations. The dataset consists of 292,315 posts and is multi-language (English and Dutch) and cross-platform (Instagram, YouTube and TikTok). We find that influencer marketing remains generally underdisclosed on social media, and that bigger influencers are not necessarily more compliant with disclosure standards.