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Influencer Guidelines
Influencers Take Note: MCCA Has Published Guidelines for Sponsored Content Antitrust, Competition and Trade

Influencers Take Note: MCCA Has Published Guidelines for Sponsored Content

Are you an influencer? Take note! The Malta Competition and Consumer Affairs Authority has now published guidelines that influencers should follow when uploading sponsored posts on social media platforms. We all know how important advertising is in the business world and, with the number of sponsored posts that are flooding social media platforms, businesses have taken to use influencers as the new powerhouses of digital marketing. As was discussed in our previous article on the topic, we do not have laws that specifically regulate influencer marketing. However, the Consumer Affairs Act – which transposes the provisions of the Unfair Trading…
Laura Spiteri
4th December 2024
Ensuring Product Safety in the Age of AI
AI in a Consumer-Driven World: Ensuring Product Safety in the Age of AI Antitrust, Competition and Trade

AI in a Consumer-Driven World: Ensuring Product Safety in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence (‘AI’) is revolutionising various industries and in today’s consumer-driven world, ensuring the safety of products is of paramount importance, more so when considering the innovative products being placed on the market. At the core of the AI Act are requirements that providers, manufacturers, importers, and distributors of AI systems must meet before making an AI system available for use or distribution on the Union market. These requirements cover AI systems that are, or that are safety components of, products such as toys, lifts, radio equipment, and medical devices which are classified as “high-risk” – that is AI systems…
Laura Spiteri
25th November 2024
It’s Official – Most Influencers Do Not Disclose Commercial Content Antitrust, Competition and Trade

It’s Official – Most Influencers Do Not Disclose Commercial Content

On 14 February 2024, the European Commission published the results of a screening, known as a “sweep”, of social media posts from influencers that it had carried out together with the national consumer protection authorities of 22 Member States – including Malta –as well as those in Norway and Iceland. The results are out…and perhaps they are hardly surprising. Whilst 97% of influencers were found to publish posts with commercial content, only 20% systematically disclosed these posts as advertising. 38% did not use platform labels to disclose commercial content (for instance the “paid partnership” label on Instagram) but preferred to…
Annalies Muscat
29th February 2024
Influencer Marketing: Protection for Consumers from #sponsored Posts on Social Media Antitrust, Competition and Trade

Influencer Marketing: Protection for Consumers from #sponsored Posts on Social Media

We all know how important advertising is in the business world. Traders use advertisements as marketing tools to inform customers and consumers about their products. With the rise of technology and social media, advertising is now taking diverse forms. Companies are increasingly turning to a more powerful tool, the ‘influencer’, to advertise their products. This phenomenon is also evident locally.  This article purports to analyse what constitutes influencer marketing and the protection afforded to consumers by Maltese law. What is an ‘influencer’? Maltese law does not define what an influencer is. However, the Consumer Affairs Act (the ‘Act’) defines a…
Laura Spiteri and Annalies Muscat
9th February 2024
The Rise of the Influencer: Consumer Protection and #Sponsored Content Antitrust, Competition and Trade

The Rise of the Influencer: Consumer Protection and #Sponsored Content

Are you an influencer? Do you earn money or other benefits by creating content on social media? Influencers that are offered deals to advertise a brand’s products over social media platforms will qualify as traders and should thus disclose their adverts in a transparent manner. Over the coming weeks, the European Commission will be screening online posts to identify any sponsored posts uploaded to social media by influencers which could mislead consumers. This article will briefly consider your obligations, as an influencer, on the digital market. The rise of social media has given brand owners the ability to push their…
Laura Spiteri
24th October 2023