Split the post into its parts, because the EU AI Act does.
The text (captions, promotional copy, engagement posts) mostly escapes. The AI-text labelling duty in Article 50(4) covers text published to inform the public on matters of public interest (health, safety, environment, economic, political, scientific matters), and ordinary marketing copy and entertainment are outside it. Even in-scope text is exempt where a competent human substantively reviews it and identifiable editorial responsibility exists: the two conditions together. Where the text duty genuinely bites on social: AI-written news-style threads, or unreviewed posts making health, financial, or sustainability claims. A skincare brand posting AI-generated "dermatologists say" content unreviewed is the cautionary example. That's a public-interest health claim, not chit-chat.
The visuals are where most real duties live. A realistic AI image or video in a post (photoreal people, real-seeming scenes, cloned voices in a clip) is deepfake-category content, and the visible-labelling duty applies at every exposure: the harmonised "AI" mark fixed on the image, opening disclaimer plus persistent icon for video, spoken disclaimer for audio. Obviously stylised or fantastical visuals are out, as everywhere under this duty.
Platform AI-label features (Instagram/TikTok/YouTube "AI-generated" toggles) are helpful, but check what they actually display before treating them as your compliance. The duty is yours as the publisher, the platform tag is one way to discharge it, and a tag that only appears in some surfaces or strips on re-share may not cover every exposure. The robust pattern is label-on-the-asset itself, with the platform toggle as a second layer.
Practical workflow for a social team: an asset-level rule ("realistic AI visual: mark before upload"), a text-level rule ("health/finance/news-adjacent claims: human review, recorded"), and a dated note of both rules in your evidence file. That's the entire compliance surface for most brands' social presence.
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