A shifting news ecosystem
Over the past two decades, journalism has been weakened by platformisation and the dominance of global tech companies that prioritise engagement over accuracy. With visibility and viability now heavily dependent on this platform logic, generative AI has triggered another round of value extraction from journalism’s already eroded business models (OSCE, 2025). Large language models are trained without remuneration on human created news, including the content behind paywalls. Search engines now answer users’ questions directly, allowing them to bypass publishers’ sites. In parallel, digital creators have risen to prominence, offering content that increasingly blurs the boundaries between journalism and personal expression (Harlow, 2024). For younger audiences, digital creators are often not an alternative to journalism but their primary source of content, occupying the role that legacy news brands played for older generations (Newman et al., 2025a). When consuming news via social networks and video sharing platforms, older age groups too frequently pay more attention to influencers than to traditional news media (Newman et al., 2025b).
This signals a deep transformation of the news ecosystem, marked by structural asymmetries in business models, revenue streams, power relations and regulatory regimes. While influencers prosper on low cost, lightly regulated and personality driven formats, journalism remains resource intensive, highly regulated, bound by professional standards and economically fragile. Influencers are also increasingly sought out by politicians (Riedel et al., 2021) and their framing of events increasingly shapes electoral narratives. Some politicians are also becoming digital content titans in their own right (Ouyang and Waterman, 2020). The news media, once the central platform for political communication and election campaigning, are losing their gatekeeping role. The example of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York illustrates this shift particularly clearly. His campaign bypassed established news outlets, used negative media coverage as material for his own social media posts, and worked on building reach and trust directly with millions of followers on TikTok, other platforms and door-to-door interaction (Kleis Nielsen, 2025).
These shifts are also visible in education. In the UK, the government has removed journalism from targeted Strategic Priorities Grant funding and ordered universities to redirect money towards other ‘high cost’ programmes (Linford, 2025). On the other hand, education for digital creators is gaining ground at universities. There are now programmes explicitly aimed at influencers, positioned somewhere between media studies, marketing and production. A brief desk review suggests that these curricula prioritise psychology of persuasion, audience engagement and techniques for mobilising followers. If competences traditionally associated with journalism are gradually sidelined in formal education, the space they once occupied is unlikely to be filled by digital content creators.
 
The regulatory paradox
Since platforms as new gatekeepers tend to prioritise influencers and emotional storytelling over journalism based on factual reporting (Milli et al., 2025; Napoli, 2019), and voters increasingly trust influencers for political news (Harff & Schmuck, 2025), it is reasonable to ask a few questions. Is the regulatory model that dedicates disproportionate attention to legacy media rather than to new forms of content creation still valid? How do we safeguard the integrity of elections, which now depends on the unregulated, though far from accidental, dynamics of the attention economy? Can we speak meaningfully of efforts to promote pluralism if we focus mainly on media ownership concentration while overlooking the power of algorithms, in relation to which even the largest media companies are rather powerless? Does it make sense to maintain resource intensive TV licensing procedures when anyone can publish a video or start live streaming with a single click and without any formal licence? And even if we extend the scope of regulation, can any framework correct these structural imbalances on its own?
These are just a few exemplary dilemmas to illustrate the paradox. On the one hand, maintaining strict legal distinctions between the conventional media and other communicators seems increasingly detached from communication reality. On the other, equating them too closely perhaps risks eroding the professional, ethical and institutional safeguards that underpin journalism’s democratic role.

 
Should influencers therefore be regulated as media or not?
Across the EU, the ideas around that, as well as approaches, differ (EAO, 2024). The debate is no longer whether influencers should be regulated at all, but how they should be regulated. More precisely, how far regulation should go beyond basic safeguards. Should popular influencers who comment on public affairs be treated more like news media, with transparency, accountability and editorial obligations, or should they remain primarily under a lighter, commercial and platform-based regime? Emerging rules point to a gradual convergence of media, advertising and platform regulation, as governments try to reconcile freedom of expression with accountability in a post-media environment. However, no consensus has yet formed, and existing arrangements remain fragmented and sometimes experimental. The recent OSCE Manual warns against regulatory capture and a “paradox of privilege”, where new policies may reinforce existing power asymmetries despite the positive intentions (OSCE, 2025). Extending regulation to influencers without clear criteria could reproduce these risks. At the same time, failing to extend it leaves the field unaccountable.
 
From consumer protection to media regulation
At the EU level, the forthcoming Digital Fairness Act aims to strengthen consumer protection in digital markets, including unfair practices such as dark patterns, addictive design and misleading influencer marketing. At the national level, a prominent example is France’s 2023 Law No. 2023-451, which aims to regulate commercial influence and combat the abuses by influencers on social networks. This is one of the most comprehensive statutory frameworks addressing digital creators, requiring transparency, advertising disclosures, and prohibiting promotion of certain high-risk products such as cosmetic surgery and some financial services.
Italy
In Italy, the public debate on influencer accountability intensified after the Chiara Ferragni pandoro fraud, which prompted both judicial proceedings and regulatory attention to the broader role of influencers in shaping public discourse. While the so-called Ferragni Law, confirmed by the government in 2024, has not (yet) been adopted, the country has taken a major step by integrating influencers into content regulation. Through recently adopted resolution the communications authority AGCOM (2025) introduced binding guidelines and a Code of Conduct for influencers (as well as vloggers, streamers, creators, uploaders) with at least 500.000 followers or an average of one million monthly views. These rules impose obligations on transparency, protection of minors, respect for intellectual property, and editorial responsibility, effectively aligning regulation of influencers with regulatory regime for audiovisual media service providers as stipulated by the Consolidated Law on Audiovisual Media Services (TUSMA, 2021).
Netherlands
The Netherlands has a hybrid model. Professional influencers with over 500,000 folowers fall under the Dutch Media Act (Mediawet, 2008) and are supervised by the media authority CvDM, which applies rules similar to those for on-demand audiovisual media services, including requirements on recognisable advertising and protection of minors. At the same time, the updated self-regulatory framework (Stichting Reclame Code, 2022), obliges influencers to disclose material relationships and avoid misleading commercial practices. Together, this combination of statutory media regulation, advertising self-regulation and general consumer law illustrates how influencers are gradually being addressed not only as commercial actors, but also as participants in a broader information environment.
Slovenia
Slovenia addressed the transformation of the media ecosystem via the media law after first treating digital creators as traders under consumer law and monitoring and sanctioning them by the Market Inspectorate for non-transparent, misleading or unfair commercial practices on social media. The new Media Act (ZMed-1, 2025) introduces influencers as a new regulatory category, defining them as content creators on large platforms with at least 10,000 followers who regularly publish and monetise content with the explicit aim of shaping public or individual opinion. The relatively low threshold reflects the scale of the national market (Slovenian language has just over two million speakers). The threshold is based solely on the number of followers and does not take into account the actual reach or engagement. The law stipulates basic obligations for digital creators who disseminate content capable of shaping public opinion, while maintaining a clear distinction between professional journalism and influencer activity. Even though influencers are not registered as media in the formal sense, they are still subject to core public-interest rules. They must clearly disclose commercial interests and sponsorships, avoid content that incites violence and hatred or promotes terrorism, protect children, and comply with limits on advertising and product placement (including bans on certain products).
 
Where to draw the line
In considering how far to go in regulation of digital content creation, a functional approach may be more appropriate than a formal one. Regulation should follow communicative impact, not institutional form. The Slovenian case points in this direction. Its aim is not to redefine journalism, but to ensure transparency and basic safeguards when public communication affects collective decision making. In the algorithmic marketplace of attention, democracy depends less on who speaks, in what format or through which channel, than on how the power to reach and persuade is distributed and held to account. The positive obligation of states under the international human rights framework “to respect, protect and fulfil media freedom, including through proactive measures to safeguard the integrity of the information environment” (OSCE, 2025), therefore implies designing frameworks that address concentrations of communicative power, whether exercised by a broadcaster, a platform, a newsroom, a YouTuber or an AI system.
The era of the media as a distinct, easily identifiable sector is clearly over. What remains is an information space that is fragmented and platform dependent. Regulation must evolve accordingly. While some fear that bringing influencers into regulatory frameworks risks equating them with journalists, thereby devaluing journalism and diluting media regulation, this misses the point. Regulation is not a badge of professional recognition but a safeguard for democratic integrity. If communicative power once concentrated in newsrooms now resides in individual creators’ accounts, ignoring that shift would mean ignoring reality.
 
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