European Consumer Groups Move Against Social Media Platforms Over Crypto Ads and Influencers

Here's a link to my post on this for Ogier Leman.

The Consumer Association of Ireland was not listed among the members of the European consumer group (BEUC) calling for action against social media platforms for facilitating misleading crypto asset promotions. In the report, Hype or Harm: The Great Social Media Crypto Con, BEUC and member consumer organisations in Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain filed a complaint with the European Commission and EU consumer authorities against Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter for facilitating the misleading promotion of crypto assets in violation of those platforms' own policies.

BEUC points out that under the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, social media platforms need to exercise a certain level of care to ensure their users are not harmed by others, including influencers. BEUC alleges that by allowing misleading crypto ads to "multiply" on their platforms through advertising and influencers, the platform operators have engaged in unfair commercial practice, exposing consumers to serious harm, in terms of losing significant amounts of money.

BEUC is also calling on the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network of authorities responsible for enforcing EU consumer protection laws to request the following action from the platforms:

Stricter advertising policies (and enforcement of them) on the advertising of crypto;

The adoption of measures to prevent influencers from misleading consumers as to the nature of crypto;

To inform the European Commission about the effectiveness of their measures to protect consumers against unfair crypto practices;

In addition, BEUC calls on European consumer authorities to cooperate with European financial supervisory authorities to ensure the platforms adapt their advertising policies to prevent the misleading promotion of crypto.