Raluca Florescu

Why platforms should reveal when visibility has been purchased

Social media popularity can influence the way people judge credibility. A creator with thousands of views may appear more established. A clinic that repeatedly appears in a feed may seem more authoritative. Someone selling an online course may look successful simply because their content receives significant attention.

However, viewers often cannot tell how that visibility was obtained.

Platforms allow creators and businesses to pay for additional distribution. There is nothing inherently wrong with advertising or paying for reach. The problem begins when paid visibility becomes difficult to distinguish from organic attention.

Paid promotion should remain visible

If someone pays a platform to increase the reach of a post, viewers should be clearly informed that the content received paid distribution.

This information should not disappear when the promotional campaign ends. The additional views, engagement, and followers generated through that exposure may remain visible and continue influencing how future visitors perceive the account.

Visibility can contribute to credibility. For that reason, people should be able to distinguish between content that reached an audience organically and content whose distribution was financially supported.

Platforms should also avoid systems that allow purchased likes or followers to imitate genuine audience approval. Paying for distribution and purchasing artificial engagement are different practices, and both should be transparent.

Medical advertising requires stronger standards

This issue becomes more serious when the content promotes medical or cosmetic services.

Dental clinics, cosmetic practices, and other healthcare businesses use social media to present treatments, before-and-after results, procedures, and educational information. Educational content may still serve a commercial purpose when it is used to build professional authority, attract patients, and promote services.

Medical decisions can involve pain, fear, appearance, financial cost, and irreversible consequences. The audience should therefore receive stronger transparency.

If a clinic pays to promote a video, that video should be clearly identified as promoted content. If medical or cosmetic results are generated or materially altered using AI, that should also be disclosed.

Transparency allows people to decide for themselves

The purpose of disclosure is not to suggest that every promoted creator, clinic, or product is unreliable.

It is to give viewers the information necessary to judge credibility for themselves.

Platforms already know when someone has paid for additional reach. Making that information visible should be a basic part of advertising transparency.

If visibility has been purchased, the audience should know.

Medical care is not ordinary social media content. When healthcare providers use social platforms to build visibility, authority and attract patients, they are engaging in marketing — even when the format is educational. That commercial context should always be visible. If they want additional reach, they should pay for advertising and that advertising should be clearly labeled.

Additionally, users should be able to exclude medical advertising entirely from their feeds.

Assisted with AI