Influencers don’t have to label opinion as an advertisement

What actually sounds like a self-evident statement in the headline and may make many readers scratch their heads a little is in the current phase, in which it seems difficult to give perfect advice to influencers, streamers and other media-active mandates, perhaps not so self-evident.

On this very basis, however, the District Court of Hamburg this year overturned an injunction that was originally issued, which had previously been issued against an influencer on Instagram.

In the specific case, the 12th Civil Chamber of the Regional Court finally denied a commercial intention and decided that there had been a purely private expression of opinion. Freedom of expression also allows us to express its views on economic issues and also on companies and products, and to make negative and positive recommendations in this context.

With the judgment, however, the Court of First Instance is less opposed to the prevailing case-law on labelling obligations, but rather in line with, for example, the Chamber Court in Berlin(see this article),which the Landgericht Berlin had thus corrected (see this article).

The jurisprudence thus always crystallises that it is important to answer in detail the question whether an advertising label is necessary in the concrete way of the post, the concrete content and the respective circumstances (such as the events of the day). In the meantime, as a lawyer, you can give a rather good and helpful guide to this question.

Of course, it also depends on the specific way of the social media channel, namely how many followers you have, what other content is available and whether products are bought themselves or are mostly sponsored.