France defines influencers rules
It is this week's news that after many months France has finally adopted a new law that better defines the professional figure of the influencer (it is the first time that it has been defined in a legal context in Europe in such a detailed way) and to try to transparently protect the consumers who deal with them but also to protect the profession from users of social networks who improvise without preparation and without complying with specific tax and commercial regulations. .
The objective is precisely both to better define the role and responsibilities of the professional figure and to limit conduct in topics and types of business that are potentially harmful to the end user, due to the risks they entail or due to the lack of transparency with which they are facing.
Meanwhile, the commercial influencer is defined as "any natural or legal person who mobilizes his or her reputation to communicate content to the public electronically aimed at directly or indirectly promoting goods, services or any other cause, in exchange for an economic or in kind whose value exceeds the thresholds established by the decree and exercises the activity of commercial influence by electronic means."
It is also an opportunity to define the function of the influencer agent as well as to force the contract between the company, the influencer agent and the influencer into written form.
The same regulation existing for baby models becomes applicable to kid influencers (you will remember an in-depth analysis on this legislative hole that we had dealt with here).
The contract MUST be in writing and if minimum established contents are not included, it would be completely void.
There are also some matters that influencers CANNOT deal with anymore, under penalty of a considerable fine.
These are matters relating to the promotion of plastic and aesthetic surgery, the consumption of nicotine, the use or public display of wild animals and also in cases of voluntary therapeutic abstention, sports predictions and bets, financial services already regulated by specific sector regulations to protect consumers.
Any influencer who is not resident in the European Union but who were to market his goods here will have to appoint a legal representative in the territory who acts on his behalf and take out damage insurance.
Furthermore, the law finally arrives at a decisive issue: the role of the platform, the social network, in relation to the potentially lying activities of influencers, establishing that they must provide for priority control and verification measures where some contents are reported as untruthful. A priority on this control will be given to those professional operators who act as controllers of this truthfulness and to whom the platforms will have to guarantee a timely response.
Among the false contents, there are photos created by artificial intelligence, retouched photos that mislead and confuse the consumer from the truthfulness, with the consequent obligation to report the retouching.
However, it is not said whether this need occurs only in the case of sponsored posts and therefore the entire part of the influencer's work in which he shows himself online to promote his/her image without actively sponsoring a product or a service in a post on his/her channel.
If we were to understand the rule as protecting the consumer and as a function of total transparency, even those images that are not immediately commercial but which contribute to the fame, engagement and ultimately the success of the influencer's commercial channel should be subject to the same transparency rules from a visual and content perspective.
The other aspect concerns the potential liability and prosecution of influencers who reside permanently outside the borders of the European Union but who offer their services online worldwide. It will be necessary to understand whether their target will be deduced from the type of interactions established or whether instead the fact of adopting valid rules in their place of tax residence and business activity will be decisive. This is the case of many “gurus” residing in the Emirates who offer in particular financial advisory services bordering on legality and which are not yet fully regulated at a global or European level.
However, the legislation is an excellent step forward, shared with trade associations and adopted almost unanimously, which gives good hopes of being applied in other systems to create a fair and coordinated structure of protection for creators and users.