The Effects of Influencer Advertising Disclosure Regulations: Evidence From Instagram
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We collect data from fifty top Instagram influencers in Germany and Spain from 2014 to 2019. Germany experienced changes in disclosure regulation for social media sponsorship during the sample period. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we study the impact of the the rules on the content of posts and the nature of interaction of followers with the posts. On the content side, we measure whether posts include suggested disclosure terms and show variable but substantial adoption of disclosure. We use an approach based on a fixed list of words associated with sponsorship (i.e. links, mentions of brands, use of words like "sale") as well as natural language processing to assess the likelihood that a post is sponsored. We show that sponsored content use may have increased after changes in disclosure and that followers may have been negatively affected. On the other hand, there is evidence that consumers' reaction to sponsored posts, measured by likes, may be quite different under stricter disclosure rules, suggesting that the rules could have a substantial impact on information transmission.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it