Policy Brief: New Incentives, Evolving Threats

The Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) are the European Union's most ambitious attempts to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for online platforms. But social media platforms operate very differently today than when these regulations were first introduced. This brief examines three key developments — the rise of social media monetization, the proliferation of inauthentic automation, and the restructuring of platforms' advertising models and publisher relationships — and their implications for information integrity and regulation.

Over the last five years, every major social media platform has introduced monetization services. Platforms not only facilitate access to revenue from audiences and advertisers, they also pay content publishers directly through revenue redistribution programs.

By paying content publishers based on engagement metrics, platforms incentivize sensational and inauthentic content. Political actors, including sanctioned entities and actors engaged in political interference and information manipulation, are also turning to monetization to fund their social media activity and subsidize their use of influencers-for-hire. This creates a troubling dynamic where platforms are directly incentivizing —and bankrolling— the undermining of information integrity.

Platforms are facing increasing competition for content, leading them to prioritize the rapid onboarding of millions of accounts into their monetization programs at the expense of due diligence. Facebook alone counts upwards of 5 million accounts as partner-publishers as of May 2025, up from less than 500,000 in early 2023.

Over the last few years, technical barriers to creating and spreading content at scale have collapsed with the growing availability and affordability of inauthentic automation tools and AI technologies.

Platforms’ financial incentives fuel the proliferation of affordable automation software that increasingly combine automated account creation, content production (increasingly powered through generative AI), and engagement. These software can be purchased online for a small fee, and enable operators to produce and distribute content at scale, as well as to leverage inauthentic engagement to game platforms’ recommender systems and manipulate views.

The use of these software is further facilitated by the rise of hardware-as-a-service operations, renting out remote access to phone farm infrastructure. Operators can now manage large-scale automated campaigns from a laptop, making inauthentic activity cheaper and easier than ever, and harder to attribute.

Starting in 2020, social media platforms have also redefined their relationship with content publishers. They’ve slowly shifted from operating as ad exchanges, reselling ad placements on behalf of publishers, to running distinct ad and content businesses.

Platforms have done this by granting themselves ownership of all advertising spaces on their services and moving to paying publishers content royalties.

In practice, this means that content publishers — including legitimate news organizations — no longer own the ad placements that were once theirs to sell. Instead, publishers are now dependent on royalties over which they have little to no control. Not only are these payments opaque and unpredictable, they can be withheld by platforms at any time, for any reason, without compensation, and are often subject to flawed automated processes.

As platforms increasingly turn to generative AI for content, there is also a risk that platforms will reduce and ultimately eliminate royalty payments, creating an existential threat for authentic content creation.

Monetization incentives, combined with automation and shifting platform-publisher relationships, has created a perfect storm, rapidly undermining information integrity and democracy.

🚫 Social media platforms incentivize — and bankroll — harmful activity.

🚫 Automation makes manipulation cheaper, easier and harder to attribute than ever.

🚫   Authentic content creators are being squeezed financially, making it harder than ever for them to compete.

The EU must take stock of these changes and adjust its approach to platform regulation accordingly:

♦️ Apply the DSA to Platforms’ Monetization Services - The DSA offers a powerful suite of tools to hold online platforms accountable for the design, functioning and use of their services. These tools must be applied to their monetization services.

♦️ Expand the DMA to Cover Monetization as a Core Platform Service - Platforms have evaded their responsibilities under the DMA by shifting to operating distinct ad and content businesses. The DMA must ensure fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory access to both advertising, and monetization services.

♦️ Mandate Transparency Around Monetization Partnerships - Users, researchers, and regulators must be able to scrutinize, research, and report on the use of monetization services, their impact on information integrity and democracy, and the effectiveness of platforms’ monetization governance.

🎬 Watch our executive director Victoire Rio present our recommendations to the European Parliament’s Democracy Shield Committee →