Here is a question worth sitting with: At what point does a platform stop being a distribution tool and start being a commercial entity that exploits its users' identities for profit? Meta appears to be testing that boundary right now, and the answer it receives from regulators, advertisers, and the creator community will shape the economics of social media for years to come.
In mid-February, Puck reported that Julia Berolzheimer, a Charleston-based fashion and lifestyle influencer with more than a million Instagram followers, publicly accused the platform of attaching "Shop the Look" buttons to her content without her knowledge. The links, generated by Instagram's AI visual recognition system, directed her followers to products similar to what she was wearing. She had not selected those products, had not vetted them, and had not been told the feature was active on her account. She learned about it only when another influencer asked how she had managed to set it up.
The commercial logic here is not hard to follow. Meta sits atop a platform used by an estimated 1.2 billion people globally. If its AI can scan any image or video, identify the products visible in the frame, and attach purchase links to competitors or alternatives, then every creator on the platform becomes a potential sales agent, whether they like it or not. Meta has said it is conducting a limited beta test and is not collecting commissions on the linked products. That is a narrow defence, and it sidesteps the central issue entirely.
The fundamental question is not whether Meta is making money from this particular test. It is whether users consented to having their content repurposed as a commercial mechanism. According to Puck, the "Shop the Look" language is borrowed directly from influencer culture, which means followers clicking the button have every reason to believe the linked products carry the creator's personal endorsement. They do not. That gap between perception and reality is where the legal exposure sits.
Alexandra Jane Roberts, a law professor at Northeastern University specialising in intellectual property and advertising law, has identified two potentially relevant legal frameworks. The first is the right of publicity, a doctrine recognised in most US jurisdictions that restricts the commercial use of someone's name, image, or likeness without consent. The second is false endorsement, a federal principle that prohibits creating the false impression that a public figure endorses a specific product. Both are worth watching as this dispute develops.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration. Meta's terms of service, which every user agrees to, grant the company broad rights to use content posted on the platform. This is not a secret. Sophisticated creators, particularly those running six-figure businesses through affiliate links and brand partnerships, are well aware of the bargain they strike when they build an audience on someone else's infrastructure. The platform provides reach; the platform also sets the rules. Berolzheimer herself operates an independent website, a Substack newsletter, and other owned channels precisely because she understands this dynamic.
Strip away the talking points and what remains is a genuine tension between platform utility and creator autonomy. Berolzheimer's response illustrated it perfectly: she found out about the feature not through any notification from Instagram, but because a peer spotted it first. That is not a beta test conducted with even minimal transparency. It is a commercial experiment run on unwitting participants.
Instagram is not operating in isolation here. As The Verge has reported, TikTok has been testing a near-identical feature called "Find similar", which uses AI to scan paused video frames and surfaces matching products from TikTok Shop. When TikTok's version launched, the opt-out option was buried deep in the platform's settings, and users had no automatic notification. Pinterest has operated a comparable shoppable overlay system for some time, and creators there eventually accepted it once the platform offered them affiliate revenue in return. That may well be where this ends up: a negotiated settlement in which platforms share a slice of the commercial upside with the creators whose content makes the whole system work.
Industry projections estimate the global creator economy could be valued at $500 billion in coming years. At that scale, the question of who captures the commercial value of a creator's image is not an abstract rights debate. It is a fundamental economic dispute about where the money flows. Creators who have built their livelihoods on a single platform are, as one industry analyst put it, operating with golden handcuffs: the reach is too valuable to abandon, even when the platform behaves in ways they find objectionable.
Reasonable people can disagree about where to draw the line between a platform's legitimate commercial interests and a creator's right to control how their identity is used for commercial purposes. What is harder to defend is the method: a quiet beta test, no proactive disclosure, and product links that carry the implicit authority of the creator's endorsement without their agreement. Meta may well refine or abandon this experiment as the backlash intensifies. But the underlying ambition, turning every post into a potential point of sale, is unlikely to disappear. The creator economy's long-term health depends on platforms and creators finding terms that don't require one side to exploit the other in silence.