In a recent post on Instagram, vlogger Celli (Andrei Shelaru) reports that summer Black Friday has begun at the electronics store. Like, in internet speak, “no one: nothing; Sally: Forget these offers from this store.’ This is simply not the case. The post is obviously an advertisement, but nowhere is it labeled as such.

This is by no means an isolated case. In fact, Celli admitted that he does not tag his ads because, according to him, the law does not oblige him, and therefore he will have to lose out in the competition with other Romanian influencers who, like him, do not always tag paid content.

This is not a practice common only among young influencers. In 2020, for example, Libertatea wrote about journalist Andrea Esca, who had hundreds of promotional posts that were not properly tagged.

C (smaller), c (larger) The reality is that often our influencers choose not to tag ads, or if they do, they don’t make it clear enough.

More recently, the National Consumer Protection Authority (ANPC) has also entered the story, recently sending 10 warning letters to some of our biggest influencers asking them to flag their ads. Despite the fact that the institution announced this gesture through official channels, it did not want to publicly announce who the recipients of the letter were.

However, does the ANPC have the legal leverage to sanction these online content creators? Does the influencer market need more regulation? Next, we try to find answers to some difficult questions for the market, which until now had almost complete freedom in our country.

Read in full at Panorama.ro