This is frankly not true in a lot of European countries. Google, Facebook and every other company cannot advertise things like toys, tobacco or alcohol to children here in Denmark, and they have to clearly tell you which parts are advertising and which aren’t. This is why Facebook has an “suggested” and an “advertising tag, that you can even click on to be told what metrics decided that you should see it. As well as options to ignore advertisers or setup personal preferences.
I’m not going to defend Google or Facebook, but they didn’t add those things because they wanted to. They added them because their platforms would be banned from Europe if they didn’t.
Influencers are actually some of the only advertisers who aren’t well regulated in Europe, and it’s honestly a real issue when they have more reach than national television stations.
In Denmark alone we’ve had issues with influencers advertising plastic surgery or sugar dating to teenagers and below. Things that are extremely illegal through any other medium, but because “influencers” fall outside of traditional law, it’s been very hard to stop them with the legalisation that we have. In fact they have only been stopped by being publicly shamed in other media, causing them so much bad press that nobody wanted to pay them to advertise things.
So it’s actually quite the opposite, but I’ll be the first to agree that the platforms should also be held into account for the things they allow influencers to post. Not a very popular opinion on HN, but as far as I’m concerned Europe would lose nothing by kicking non-EU software companies where it hurts.