BRUSSELS — The European Commission proposed rules on Wednesday that would require social media influencers to attach a single standardized label to every paid post across the bloc, and would hold platforms liable for making the label visible, after regulators found that three-quarters of sponsored content in a 27-country sweep carried no disclosure at all.
The proposal, which must be approved by the European Parliament and member governments, would replace a patchwork of national rules with one word, displayed in a fixed position and format, and would require platforms to encode the label so it can be read by machines and cannot be hidden in a caption’s 14th line. Fines would reach 4 percent of a platform’s global turnover and 2 percent of an influencer’s annual income.
“The consumer has a right to know when a recommendation is an advertisement. That is not a new principle. It is 50 years old,” said Lieve Vandenbroucke, the Commission official who oversees consumer enforcement. “What is new is that 28 million Europeans follow someone who sells them things while pretending to be a friend.”
The sweep, conducted last winter by national consumer agencies, examined 1,200 accounts with more than 50,000 followers each. Seventy-six percent of posts that regulators judged to be paid were not labeled; of those that were, half used wording so vague, such as “partner” or “collab,” that most viewers in a follow-up survey did not understand it as advertising.
Influencers themselves are divided. Emma Laurent, 27, a Paris-based creator with 1.2 million followers who posts about skin care and travel, said she already labeled her sponsored content and would welcome a rule that forced her competitors to do the same. “The ones who hide it make the rest of us look dishonest,” she said. “But a fixed word in a fixed place? My feed is my shop window. Brussels does not design my shop window.”
Consumer groups say that is exactly the point. “A shop window has a sign that says shop,” said Dario Castellani of the European Consumer Organization, which has pushed for the rules since 2022. He noted that children were the heaviest consumers of influencer content and the least able to spot a disguised pitch.
A trade group representing the largest platforms said in a statement that its members already offered disclosure tools and that making companies liable for creators’ choices would be “unworkable at the scale of billions of posts.” Ms. Vandenbroucke was unmoved. “They find things at the scale of billions of posts whenever an advertiser pays them to,” she said. “They can find a label.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 7 of the European edition with the headline: Brussels Moves to Make Influencers Say Who’s Paying, Every Post, Every Time.
