Responsible Gaming Communication must protect players

Milan, June 6, 2025 – In a context where public and regulatory debate on gambling imposes new responsibilities to protect consumers, the Fair Foundation reiterates the need to radically rethink how “responsible gambling” is communicated.

According to Fair, the Foundation established to promote culture and tools for player protection, communication cannot be reduced to a formal requirement. Advising caution and inviting people to “gamble responsibly” is not enough. It is necessary to go beyond slogans and invest in messages that, based on principles of transparency and relevance, generate real awareness, stimulate critical thinking, and restore dignity and tools for informed choice to players, also in line with user and consumer protection principles provided by European legislation. Communication is, in every respect, a cultural lever and must be treated as such.

In Italy, recent legislation on gambling communication introduces an important principle – the obligation for remote gambling licensees to allocate part of their revenues to prevention campaigns – but still leaves wide margins for interpretation. Pending new guidelines to clarify and direct the context, the risk is that protective messages may be twisted into promotional logic, nullifying the goal of consumer protection and generating effects contrary to those intended.

Fair emphasizes a key point: good communication does not defend the image of operators, but the well-being of players. It must help people understand why and how certain dynamics can become risky, doing so with honest, rigorous, and unambiguous language.

The Foundation reiterates its availability to support AGCOM (the Italian Communications Regulatory Authority) in disseminating new, transparent, and shared guidelines that take into account existing legislation, and hopes the gambling sector will undertake a serious path toward self-regulation. At the same time, Fair offers its expertise to provide solid theoretical, scientific, and cultural foundations on how to communicate in a way truly oriented toward protecting players, so that public messages have a positive, clear, and coherent impact on consumer health.