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Some 20,000 violation cases of paid advertisements on social media reported last year

입력 2025.03.17 17:55

Kim Se-hoon

More than 20,000 cases of so-called “paid advertisements,” which were paid for but not properly labeled as such, were found on Instagram and other online platforms last year.

The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said on March 16 that it found a total of 22,011 suspected posts of paid advertisements last year after monitoring major social media platforms. A total of 26,033 posts were voluntarily corrected.

“Paid advertisement” is an act of advertising without clearly marking it as an advertisement even though a writer of a post has paid from an advertiser. It is characterized by the high participation of small businesses (advertisers) or ordinary people (post writers) due to high accessibility and low advertising costs. According to the FTC’s guidelines, which were revised last December, writers must clearly disclose their economic interests in the “title” or the “first part” of a post.

Examples of paid advertisements provided by the Fair Trade Commission.

By social media platforms, Instagram had the highest number of paid advertisements at 10,195 cases, followed by NAVER Blog (9,423 cases) and YouTube (1,409 cases). There were 984 cases on other social media platforms, including Naver Cafe and Post and TikTok.

In particular, the number of paid advertisements in short-form content, such as Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts (3,691 cases), increased significantly compared to the previous year.

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By type, the most common type of violation was the inappropriate position where economic interests were marked (39.4 percent). This includes disclosures in the ”more” section, additional explanation section, and comments, where consumers cannot easily find the advertisement information. This was followed by not displaying it at all (26.5 percent) and displaying it in an inappropriate way, such as in small or blurry letters (17.3 percent).

By product, health and hygiene products (23.6 percent) had the most paid advertisements.

※This article has undergone review by a professional translator after being translated by an AI translation tool.