The EU Wants to Rein In Influencer Marketing — But 97% of Posts Won't Even Say "This Is an Ad"

Recently I came across a set of figures that left me cold.

In 2024 the European Commission, together with consumer protection authorities from 22 member states plus Norway and Iceland, ran a sweep. They sampled 576 influencers across seven platforms: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X, Snapchat, and Twitch.

The result? 97% of them were posting commercial content. But only about 20% honestly labelled it "this is an ad."

And the remaining 80%? 38% didn't even switch on the platform's built-in "paid partnership" tag, preferring vague phrases like "collab" or "thanks to the brand" to gloss over it. 30% didn't include a single piece of company information in their posts.

Good grief.

How Big Is This Business, Really?

To grasp this, you first have to see how large the influencer-marketing pot has grown.

Influencer Marketing Hub's 2024 report put the global influencer-marketing market at $24 billion. In a survey of brands and PR agencies worldwide, more than 85% said they planned to use influencer marketing, and about 25% were ready to pour over 40% of their marketing budget into it.

Who's most in demand? Not the mega-influencers with tens of millions of followers, but nano- and micro-influencers. Why? Cheap, and they look real. Brands' favourite platform to invest in is TikTok, closely followed by Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.

Why is influencer marketing so hot? In a word: authenticity.

In the eyes of their followers, influencers aren't "advertisers" — they're "regular people." A recommendation from a regular person sounds more trustworthy than an ad the brand ran itself. That sense of "looking real" is its most valuable asset — and its most dangerous feature.

When "Real" Becomes a Tool

This is where the trouble begins.

Think about it. A young woman posts outfits, travel, and selfies every day, telling you this cream is great and that restaurant is worth a visit. You think she's sharing from the heart, but behind every single post a brand is picking up the tab. Free products, free trips, free services — all count as "compensation."

Whether there's a written contract doesn't matter. Take the perks and stay silent, and it's a hidden ad.

It gets worse. Some influencers just starting out pretend they have brand deals in order to bait real ones. Others simply buy fake followers, likes, and views, inflating their "influence" and then leveraging it to negotiate price. Nevado-Catalán et al. wrote in their 2023 research that this underground market has matured to the point where you can pick parameters — quality, speed, country of delivery, even the gender of the fake accounts.

It's not just consumers being deceived — the brands footing the bill are too.

Beautiful Beyond Belief

Dig one layer deeper, and the problem cuts deeper still.

Influencers love filters, the right angle, careful lighting — shooting themselves with flawless skin, slender bodies, pearly-white teeth. These carefully retouched images and videos push an aesthetic standard almost no one can reach.

The result? A 2022 study by Pedalino and Camerini found that scrolling Instagram is associated with lower body satisfaction. Research by Peng and Hakimzadeh in 2025 was even more direct: regularly consuming beauty-influencer content worsens self-objectification, body-image anxiety, and the pressure to conform, dragging the aesthetic toward an ever-narrower norm. And a 2024 study noted that following fitness and beauty influencers is linked not only to lower body satisfaction but to more severe eating-disorder symptoms.

Fortunately, a counter-current is rising. More and more people are slapping on the #NoFilter tag and embracing body acceptance. This kind of content can actually give followers "emotional relief" and help them feel better about their bodies.

The fake weighs people down; the real lifts them up.

Dangerous Goods, and Kids Who Can't Fact-Check

Some influencers simply exploit their followers' trust to sell dangerous goods.

In that 2024 EU sweep, one in five influencers was pushing unhealthy or harmful products: junk food, alcohol, cosmetic procedures, plastic surgery, gambling, cryptocurrency. For minors and other vulnerable groups, this exposure is especially damaging.

Then there are counterfeit goods. A two-round UK-based survey by Sheperd et al. in 2023 found that among consumers aged 16 to 60 who are active on social media, 22% bought fakes — specifically because an influencer recommended them. Counterfeits not only rip off consumers and steal business from legitimate brands; the labour conditions in the factories behind them are often appalling.

Even more worrying is the truthfulness of the information. Influencers trade on "trust" and are often treated as opinion leaders, but they don't necessarily know more than anyone else. In UNESCO's 2024 survey of content creators across 45 countries, 63% admitted they don't verify information before sharing it. And even when they do fact-check, they often rely on unreliable metrics like likes and view counts.

The Last People Who Should Be Shortchanged Are the Kids Being Filmed

There's another group that barely has the ability to speak for itself — kidfluencers, child influencers.

Some children appear on their own, but more often it's the parents who control the content, the commercial partnerships, and the income. Van den Abeele et al. studied 7-to-12-year-old child influencers and their parents in the Netherlands, the UK, and Belgium in 2024, and found that these accounts tend to present not who the child actually is, but who the parents want the child to become.

In their 2025 research, Clark and Jno-Charles called "child influencers" a new form of child labour — children's play being monetised as work. Their privacy is invaded, they're economically exploited, and they suffer psychological and emotional harm. And the money earned mostly isn't deposited into bank accounts in the child's name, waiting for them to use when they grow up.

The Laws Exist, but They're Scattered Everywhere

It's not that the EU hasn't regulated — it's that the regulation is fragmented.

There's no single dedicated law for influencer marketing; it's been split across several horizontal regulations: the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, the E-Commerce Directive, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, the Digital Services Act, and the Digital Markets Act. That sounds like a lot, but each one only covers a segment.

Take the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive: its Article 7(2) treats "failing to disclose commercial intent" as a misleading omission, Article 8 bans aggressive commercial practices, and Annex I specifically names practices that are banned outright — not disclosing advertiser payment in editorial content, pretending to be a consumer, and directly exhorting children to buy things.

The Digital Services Act, for its part, requires online platforms to give users (including influencers) the ability to declare commercial content, so that ads can be identified in real time. It bans targeting ads at minors. And Very Large Online Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok have to take on heavier systemic-risk assessment obligations, including for hidden ads and illegal content.

The rules aren't badly written — the problem is that who bears how much responsibility along the chain is left unsaid.

The European Commission has acted too. In May 2025 it preliminarily found that TikTok had failed to provide information on ad content, advertisers, and targeting as required. That October, it preliminarily held that Meta hadn't given users a simple mechanism to report illegal content.

The Member States Moved First

While the EU is still on the road, several member states have legislated on their own.

France was the first to take the plunge. In June 2023, France passed Law No. 2023-451, specifically governing commercial influence and cracking down on influencer abuses targeting French audiences. The law has since been amended several times. It requires paid or sponsored posts to be clearly and legibly labelled as commercial content. Photos or videos that alter a person's appearance must carry the wording "images retouchées" (retouched images); AI-generated content must carry "images virtuelles" (virtual images).

It also bans certain things outright: cosmetic surgery, so-called therapies claimed to replace medical treatment, nicotine products, certain exotic or wild animals, some financial services, sports-betting tips, and gambling. Foreign influencers targeting French audiences must appoint a legal representative within the EU and take out civil liability insurance.

Spain took a different path. Royal Decree 444/2024, promulgated on 30 April 2024, singles out "high-impact influencers" — defined as those with annual income over €300,000, more than one million followers, and at least 24 videos posted in the previous year. Such influencers are treated as "specially significant users," brought under Spain's audiovisual communications regulation, required to register, and bound by a string of obligations including commercial-content labelling and a ban on posting inappropriate content aimed at minors.

The Netherlands, Finland, and Ireland have either updated industry self-regulation codes or issued government guidance, and the core of all of it lands on the same point: if you've taken a perk, label it clearly — and the label has to be visible to followers at a glance, not hidden away.

Who Has the Final Say? Nobody Can Call the Shots

Whether new rules should be added is the subject of a fierce debate in Europe.

Consumer-protection groups are shouting "yes." The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) has repeatedly pressed the EU to legislate. As early as 2023 it demanded: a legal definition of "influencer marketing"; a presumption of commercial intent whenever a post receives any form of benefit; a unified EU-wide ad label; and joint and several liability across influencers, agencies, and brands. It also argued that influencer marketing of unhealthy food, gambling, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and high-risk financial products to minors should be banned. In its December 2025 position paper, BEUC added an even sharper demand: people under 15 should not be allowed to be influencers, nor to appear in influencer marketing.

Brands take a different stance. The European Brands Association (AIM), representing EU consumer-goods manufacturers, responded to the Digital Fairness Act consultation by calling for a clear legal definition of "influencer," shared responsibility across the entire advertising chain, and obligations covering all influencers reaching European consumers. But in categories like food and alcohol, AIM believes existing self-regulation and co-regulation are already sufficient.

The European Influencer Marketing Alliance (EIMA), an industry body, would rather have practical guidance and stronger enforcement than new law. It welcomed the EU's Influencer Legal Hub and wants social platforms to promote the hub to influencers.

TikTok's own position is clear: it opposes overlapping obligations and opposes mandates dictating exactly how commercial content must be labelled. It proposed setting up a centralised regulatory and enforcement body dedicated to investigating large-scale violations of influencer-marketing rules.

So you see — consumers want to crank up the rules, platforms want the burden reduced, and brands want to hold their ground. None of the three will budge.

The Real Test Comes in Q4 2026

What happens next hinges on the Digital Fairness Act.

In its 2026 work programme, the European Commission listed it as a legislative initiative for the fourth quarter of 2026. The act is expected to address several online consumer-protection challenges at once: misleading influencer marketing, dark patterns that manipulate consumer decisions, addictive design in digital products, and personalised unfair practices that exploit consumers' vulnerabilities. The related public consultation closed on 24 October 2025.

On 14 May 2024, the Council of the European Union also weighed in, calling on the Commission and member states to promote responsible influencer behaviour, improve the media and digital literacy of influencer audiences, and step up research on the situation and well-being of child influencers.

These signals show that momentum at the EU level to tackle misleading influencer marketing is genuinely building.

But this bill is arriving at an awkward moment. The current European Commission and several EU leaders are putting "simplification, regulatory restraint, and competitiveness" at the top of the agenda. The upshot is that the Digital Fairness Act will become a test: can the EU find a path that protects consumers from being ripped off without strangling an industry that has already grown to $24 billion?

I don't know the answer.

But I do know one thing: those 97% of posts pumping out commercial content while refusing to even say "this is an ad" won't turn honest on their own. Until the rules arrive, they'll keep right on sitting there, cashing in on trust.

That's worth a thought.