Across Platforms and Languages: Dutch Influencers and Legal Disclosures on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok

TL;DR

This study develops a methodology to assess influencer disclosure compliance across platforms and languages, revealing widespread underdisclosure and no correlation between influencer size and compliance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel legal compliance measurement approach and applies it to a large, multilingual Dutch influencer dataset across multiple social media platforms.

Findings

Influencer marketing is often underdisclosed on social media.

Larger influencers are not necessarily more compliant with disclosure standards.

The methodology distinguishes between legally sufficient and insufficient disclosures.

Abstract

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.