OPEN LETTER
Digital Fairness Act
Influencer Marketing Rules Must Encompass All Platform Monetisation Services
Published: 06 July 2026
We, the undersigned civil society organisations, academics and advocates are writing to share our recommendations for how the forthcoming Digital Fairness Act could best ensure informed content consumption.
We welcome the Commission’s intent to regulate influencer marketing and agree that influencers should disclose the payments they receive for their content, as well as the source of these payments.
Consumers have a right to know the commercial interest behind the content they consume.
Effective rules on influencer marketing, however, must guarantee transparency not only about payments received from external actors, but also from platforms.
Social media platforms increasingly provide monetisation services enabling creators and influencers to generate revenue directly through their services. These include:
- Audience funding tools (subscriptions, donations)
- Brand funding tools (affiliate marketing, branded partnerships)
- Platforms’ own monetisation programs and bonuses
To guarantee informed content consumption, platforms should provide the necessary transparency for consumers to be able to know when creators and influencers are benefiting financially through platforms’ own monetisation services.
In our view, meaningful transparency would require, at a minimum:
- Content labels indicating when a post, video, or stream benefits from platform monetisation features
- Account labels indicating when an account participates in monetisation programs or has monetisation features enabled
- Monetisation libraries or equivalent public repositories that allow stakeholders to understand who benefits from platforms’ monetisation programs and features, and enable independent oversight
- Transparency around platforms’ monetisation governance, including the applicable policies, moderation processes, and enforcement metrics relevant to the rollout of their monetisation programs and features
Consumers should also be able to report accounts that benefit from platforms’ monetisation services in violation of the law or platforms’ own monetisation policies.
We would welcome the opportunity to discuss concrete drafting options that would operationalise these principles within the Digital Fairness Act and ensure that transparency obligations keep pace with the evolution of platform‑enabled monetisation.
Signed
- AlgorithmWatch
- Bits of Freedom
- Carlos Diaz Ruiz, Associate Professor, Hanken School of Economics. Finland
- CEE Digital Democracy Watch
- Check My Ads
- Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO)
- Defend Democracy
- Digihumanism - Centre for AI & Digital Humanism
- Digital Rights Foundation
- Digitally Right
- Global Forum for Media Development
- MEMO 98
- New School of the Anthropocene
- WHAT TO FIX
- Xnet, Institute for Democratic Digitalisation