A Commissioner From Cork Sets the Agenda
Michael McGrath, Ireland's European Commissioner for Democracy, Justice and Consumer Protection, has previewed the EU's forthcoming Digital Fairness Act, telling the Irish Examiner that influencers "making a living from paid endorsements without disclosing their commercial interest" are as much a target as "ticketing platforms hiking prices from the start to the end of an online queue." The Act, expected to be tabled in the fourth quarter of 2026 according to the European Parliament's own legislative tracker, will require influencers to "clearly and prominently disclose advertising" and is expected to restrict promotion of plastic surgery, gambling and what McGrath calls "risky financial products."
The Case the Commission Is Making
The steelman here is genuinely strong, and it's backed by the Commission's own enforcement data. In a 2023 sweep coordinated across 22 member states plus Norway and Iceland, national consumer authorities checked 576 influencer profiles. The results, released in February 2024, were stark: 97% of the profiles carried commercial content, but only 20% consistently disclosed it as advertising, and 358 influencers were flagged for further national-level investigation, per the International Consumer Protection Enforcement Network. That is not a marginal compliance gap — it is the overwhelming norm. Existing EU rules under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive already require ad disclosure, but as Osborne Clarke's analysis of the Commission's own fitness check notes, there is "considerable legal uncertainty about the required standard and modalities" — leaving both influencers and regulators guessing at what compliance actually looks like. On the content restrictions, McGrath's framing centers on minors: he wants to stop products "clearly being targeted at kids when they really shouldn't be." France has already banned influencer marketing of cosmetic procedures, prescription drugs, nicotine and certain financial assets like cryptocurrency, per Osborne Clarke, and the case for a body publicly consuming unregulated "buy this stock" or "try this filler" content from a 22-year-old with a ring light is not hard to make.
Where the Case Weakens
The disclosure mandate is the easy call, and this publication has no quarrel with it: requiring a label on a paid post is a low-cost, high-clarity rule that resembles decades of settled advertising law offline. Harmonizing that standard across 27 member states — rather than leaving "legal uncertainty," as the Commission's own fitness check admits — is a genuine efficiency gain for creators who currently have to guess which of 27 national interpretations applies to a single Instagram post.
The outright category bans are a different animal, and here the Act risks overcorrecting. "Plastic surgery," "gambling" and "risky financial products" are broad, elastic categories that sweep in a lot of lawful, adult-facing commercial speech alongside the content genuinely aimed at minors. A licensed EU gambling operator advertising through an influencer to a verified adult audience is a materially different problem than an unlicensed offshore book targeting teenagers — but a blanket promotion ban doesn't obviously distinguish between them, and the Commission's own consultation, per Osborne Clarke, has moved between framing this as a minors-protection measure and floating outright prohibition. "Risky financial products" is worse: it is not a defined legal term, and history with EU financial-promotion rules suggests it will be defined expansively, catching legitimate fintech and crypto-adjacent education content along with the deceptive get-rich-quick posts everyone agrees are the actual target. The 15 civil-society groups — AlgorithmWatch, Bits of Freedom, Check My Ads and others — who wrote to the Commission in July 2026 pushing to extend transparency rules to platform-funded creator earnings (livestream gifts, engagement bonuses) show where this expands next: today's disclosure mandate becomes tomorrow's registry of every euro a creator earns, a compliance burden that lands hardest on small, independent creators without a talent agency's legal department.
The Proportionate Path
A Digital Fairness Act that mandated clear, EU-wide disclosure standards and banned deceptive practices — undisclosed sponsorship, AI-altered "before and after" images passed off as real, marketing dressed up as organic content — would close the actual gap the 2024 sweep exposed without reaching for content-category prohibitions that are far harder to draft narrowly and far easier to over-enforce. McGrath's own language leans this way: he wants consumers to know "there is an underlying transaction at play," which is a disclosure problem, not a content-category problem. The Commission should resist the temptation to solve a transparency failure with a censorship instrument. The 576-influencer sweep proved Europeans don't know when they're being sold to. It did not prove that adults should be barred from seeing lawful gambling or cosmetic-surgery ads because a minor might also see them — that is a targeting and age-verification problem, and conflating it with disclosure risks a law that satisfies neither goal cleanly. With the proposal due in Q4 2026, the drafting window is now, and the industry consultation McGrath has opened is the moment to narrow the content bans to what is demonstrably minors-targeted rather than category-wide.