France is set to become the first country in the world to define ‘influencer’ in national law and attempt to regulate the activity of people who seek a digital following and promote everything from products to places in exchange for money.
A joint committee composed of members of the two chambers of Parliament, the Assemblée Nationale and the Senate, unanimously adopted a final text of the bill on May 25th.
Originally proposed by Arthur Delaporte of the socialist party and Stéphane Vojetta from Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, senators and deputies hammered out a text that will likely go for a final vote in the coming week.
The jointly agreed-upon text defines an influencer as “natural or legal persons who mobilise their notoriety” to promote “directly or indirectly, goods, services or any cause whatsoever in return for payment,” either in cash or in kind.
One of the contentious points between senators and deputies was how strictly influencers should be prohibited from promoting medicines. The final text landed on the National Assembly’s original and somewhat less strict version, as it refers to laws already in place restricting the promotion of pharmaceutical and parapharmaceutical or alternative medicine supplements.
The bill does explicitly prohibit promoting cosmetic surgery and therapeutic abstention, which means advising the cessation or substitution of a treatment provided by a healthcare professional.
At the same time, influencers are explicitly free to echo and promote the government’s public health campaigns, such as preventing sexually transmitted diseases or promoting vaccination campaigns.
Regarding cryptocurrency, influencers will be subject to the rules already put in place by French financial authorities, which highly regulate who and how financial services and activities are promoted.
All influencers are already required to clearly display when content is sponsored, and clearly notify if the influencer’s appearance has been changed through a filter or other image-enhancing technology.
They will now also be required to carry civil liability insurance as a measure to combat fraud.
“We had meetings with victims of scams from everything from medical malpractice to drop-shipping to cryptocurrency-based Ponzi schemes,” Vojetta told Time Magazine in an interview at the beginning of May.
Several high-profile cases of dishonest influencers causing harm helped form the background for the law, including a class action lawsuit with over a hundred plaintiffs accusing French social media influencers of deliberately leading them to lose money on trading and NFT (non-fungible token) platforms, Time also reports.
Besides cases of scams, the bill will be approved against the backdrop of increased vigilance by Macron against his opponents, including ordinary citizens who express their opposition on social media, such as the case of a woman who was arrested for insulting the French president for his pandemic policies. Macron has increasingly used a little-invoked French law that prohibits insulting the president of the Republic.
Though France has stepped out first on the issue, governments around the world are taking note of influencers, who have to come to rival older, more common, and already clearly regulated forms of advertising.
Norway passed a law in 2021 requiring online promoters to disclose their use of image-altering technologies. In the UK, parliament carried out an inquiry into influencer culture last year that concluded with a call for the creation of a code of conduct for influencer marketing and further study to inform regulation.
The influencer market will be worth $69.92 billion dollars by 2029, according to Data Bridge Market Research.
