Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK), acting in cooperation with four state institution, has held talks with Meta, Google and TikTok about social media advertising.
According to UOKiK, all these platforms acknowledge that while content posted on their servers must comply with their internal policies and cannot violate any national laws, the problem of advertising banned products or services continues to prevail. They have all expressed their willingness to cooperate with the applicable authorities and the industry as such to address that challenge.
Tomasz Chrostny, president of UOKiK, said: We have adopted a systematic approach to our work on influencer marketing. We verify whether advertising content published on social media by influencers is labeled properly – by educating and conducting formalized activities. Simultaneously, we keep identifying new areas of concern, most notably related to violating the ban to advertise specific products or services, with gambling and alcohol being good examples here. These problems are reported to us by online users themselves, although it is not UOKiK’s responsibility to eliminate such legal violations. The number of advertisements promoting unauthorized products would certainly be lower if the social media platforms stepped up their efforts to counter such practices and held the influencers accountable for violating the law and the social platforms’ internal regulations, for instance by suspending their accounts more frequently or deleting them altogether. With that taken into consideration, we join our forces with the remaining institutions to request the social media platforms to face the challenge and quickly do away with unauthorized commercial messages and hold the content creators accountable”.
He added: “We call for the introduction of an effective path for reporting legal violations on social media and for the establishment of an effective procedure for enabling the platforms to respond to the problems we have identified. Each of the institutions protecting online users has identified similar needs in its specific field of activity, noticing also the requirement for improved cooperation. It is also necessary to make better use of the tools and functionalities currently offered by the platforms, so that if something goes wrong, the platforms can actually step in to take care of their users’ safety. The round table session is another step we have taken toward regulating the influencer marketing industry”.
All participants of the meeting agreed that the lack of clear labelling of commercial content and unlawful ads promoting specific products and services are crucial problems faced by the digitised society, in the era of widespread access to social media. The dialog on improving specific procedures designed to exercise control over potentially unlawful advertising content has been initiated and will be continued.
