The Communications Authority (Agcom) has introduced stricter rules for influencer activity. This was announced in a note from the same body, which explains how the Council unanimously approved on January 10 guidelines useful for ensuring compliance with the provisions Consolidated Act on Audiovisual Media Services popular personalities on the internet.
Who the new rules apply to
The office draws attention to “increasing importance and spread” the work of people on social networks creates, produces and disseminates to a wide audience audiovisual content for which they have actual editorial responsibility. In particular, Agcom focuses on characters operating in Italy that they achieve at least one million followers on different platforms and which exceeded the value on at least one of them engagement rate medium equal to 2%.
Regarding the content of the messages that ended up under the lens of the office, the note mentions mainly those that may fall under the auspices regulations relating to commercial communicationsprotection fundamental rights of persons, minors and sports values. In all such cases, the Authority shall provide a mechanism of warning and orders aimed at adaptation or even removal content. The Consolidated Law on Audiovisual Media, to which influencers are effectively compared, provides for fines of up to 250,000 euros and from 30,000 to 600,000 euros in the case of minors.
In detail, when influencers share videos in which they sponsor one or more products, they will be called based on Agcom clues to insert text highlight the advertising nature of the published content. Written which must be “easily and immediately recognizable“.
Other steps set out in the new guidelines include launching technical desk which will have to establish the measures that the personalities of the site will have to follow. In this sense, they will be deployed systems of transparency and influencer recognitionwhich must be easily “identifiable and contactable“.
The table will be expanded to include operators who take care of the relations between the protagonists of social networks and companies, i.e. various agencies and intermediaries. In this way, the authority believes that it can guide the future activities of these professionals, to avoid non-compliance.