FTC takes aim at bloggers
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the U.S. has imposed new guidelines that will force bloggers to disclose any “material connection” to advertisers. These new guidelines also apply to people who use social media, especially celebrities who use Twitter, and who fail to disclose their connection to advertisers, if payment is involved.
The new rules go into effect on December 1, and anyone found guilty could face fines up to $11,000 for each violation. The law attempts to address the issue of bloggers and other social media users who make false or unsubstantiated claims.
I understand the desire for transparency, when someone promotes a product or service; consumers have a right to know whether an endorsement is genuine or not, or whether that endorsement has been paid for or not. But the blogosphere already does an adequate job identifying and ignoring bloggers who are not being completely honest and forthcoming about their connections with advertisers.
The new ruling begs the question of how the FTC plans to regulate the blogosphere. How is it going to monitor the millions of bloggers who write about kitchen appliances, gaming software, widescreen TVs and other products? What about bloggers working outside of the U.S., whose words and influence are felt mostly in the U.S.?
It appears that regulating these new guidelines would be a logistical nightmare, if not an impossibility. Let’s say someone working at a sporting outlet writes a blog about products, and she happens to endorse a line of brand name running shoes that were supplied to her by the company. If she fails to mention in her blog that she received free swag, she would effectively be breaking the law.
What if she also had a Twitter account with hundreds of thousands of followers? If she Tweeted her endorsement about the running shoes, and failed to mention her connection to the company, she’d be guilty. How is it possible, in 140 characters, to review a product and disclose your material connection to a company?
From my perspective, the new FTC guidelines sound pretty heavy-handed. In Canada, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has not imposed any guidelines for bloggers or other social media. I don’t anticipate any such decision in the foreseeable future.
In June, the CRTC ruled that it would take a “hands off” approach to the Internet for the time being. There had been discussion about the need to impose some form of “Canadian content” regulations for Canadian Internet providers, but that didn’t amount to anything.
It will be interesting to see what bloggers get caught in the crosshairs of the FTC’s new regulations. Something tells me that they’ll probably go after a celebrity blogger first, just to set an example.
We’ll see.
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I agree. The FTC will probably go after some big celebrity for their first bust. This ruling is pretty well unenforceable. Who knows, maybe a whole new bureaucracy will be formed to monitor Bloggers and Twitter — governments love to set up new bureaucracies!