Mark Hoofnagle has a MD and PhD in physiology from the University of Virginia, and is now a general surgery resident. His interest in denialism concerns the use of denialist tactics to confuse public understanding of scientific knowledge.
Bloggers, under new guidelines issued by the Federal Trade Commission, you must disclose gifts or payments for products that you review! Also your endorsements cannot be false or misleading!
The FTC's release advises:
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that "material connections" (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers - connections that consumers would not expect - must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other "word-of-mouth" marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement - like any other advertisement - is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.
Also, the FTC is tightening the screws on weight loss products. It's no longer okay to just say, "results not typical." Instead they must present information about consumers may generally expect from the product (nothing!).
...advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides - which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as "results not typical" - the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor.
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This is damn good. One of the most disheartening things about working in the video game industry for me was the realization that a lot of the reviewers, including the fanbloggers are buttered up. Which is why certain big name but crap games get a c rating worst from a majority of reviewers. Companies use metacritic scores as a measure of sucess and a predictor of sales, but these scores are a bit...uh...inflated.
It's great that bloggers are going to have to disclose. While they're not subject to a lot of the political Pressures to slant journalism a certain way, they're also a lot cheaper to pay off than a big magazine.
Posted by: Scrabcake | October 6, 2009 1:50 PM
How on earth are they going to enforce this? And what are the consequences for anonymous bloggers? Watch your steps, I guess...
Posted by: lukas | October 6, 2009 5:56 PM
@lucas, as they enforce anything else: they go after the outliers and the enforcement actions tend to keep more responsible people in line.
Posted by: Chris Hoofnagle
| October 6, 2009 10:08 PM
I for one welcome our new overlords at the FTC. Just to be safe, I think I will send *all* of my proposed blog posts to Washington for their prior approval.
Posted by: John S. | October 6, 2009 10:59 PM
Note to bloggers in The Rest Of The World: the Federal Trade Commission is an organ of the United States government, so their guidelines, of course, apply only to U.S.-based bloggers.
Posted by: passing stranger | October 7, 2009 5:21 AM
While they're not subject to a lot of the political Pressures to slant journalism a certain way, they're also a lot cheaper to pay off than a big magazine.
Posted by: rx-1 | October 7, 2009 9:18 AM
Huh. So.. If the "blogger" is a non-profit, like say... the morons running fishscam.com, and sunscam.com (I think that is what that one is), which promote the idea that mercury in fish is OK, or tanning beds won't give you cancer, or a whole list of other scams (the irony of them using that in the names... lol), does this still count? Because the argument made last night by the right winger that runs these things has been that, "As a non-profit I don't need to disclose who is paying us to quote bad/false, or made up, science, in an attempt to undermine and discredit the good science." Not that he admitted that the stuff on his sites might have been... less than honest, done by payed shills with an agenda in the first place, or quote mined to support his agenda.
Yeah. Would love to see this enforceable, though I doubt it would be, but it needs to be applied to "anyone" promoting questionable information or a specific view of something, not just reviewers, and not just random people, while excluding some "protected" class, like non-profits.
Posted by: Kagehi
| October 7, 2009 3:42 PM
It has always been the case that you must disclose when you are paid to endorse a product. The new guide is basically just confirming that (a) this includes paid endorsements made on blogs and through social media outlets, and that (b) being paid to review a product is considered by the FTC to be an endorsement of that product.
Nothing has changed regarding the definition or prosecution of false product claims. The problem with woo claims is that it is difficult and expensive to prove the cases, and prosecuting them doesn't result in any changes on the whole. None of the new guidelines address that.
That is, with the possible exception of the "non-typical results" thing, despite being targeted at weight-loss products...
If a company wants to advertise the non-typical benefits of their products, they must be capable of fulfilling their obligation to also provide the typical results... so they must have a means by which to collect data on their customers. That may be impossible for many woo products.
Posted by: Jaban | October 11, 2009 1:02 AM
I should correct myself slightly:
"Nothing has changed regarding the definition or prosecution of false product claims."
The old FTC guide made no mention of the liability of endorsers themselves if they make false claims about a product, it only mentioned the advertisers.
But the FTC Act itself does hold the endorsers liable for claims they make. The new guide mentions it specifically because the guide, though it does not countermand the Act, can be used on appeal to argue that the FTC has been misleading by including mention of advertiser liability for the false claims of endorsers but specifically excluding mention of the endorsers' liability for the same.
So nothing has changed legally, but they are pulling the wings off a major appeal argument.
Posted by: Jaban | October 11, 2009 1:22 AM
Now if we could only get bloggers to honestly disclose they are philosophical shills for the NCSE.
Posted by: William Wallace | October 21, 2009 1:20 AM
The old FTC guide made no mention of the liability of endorsers themselves if they make false claims about a product, it only mentioned the advertisers.
But the FTC Act itself does hold the endorsers liable for claims they make. The new guide mentions it specifically because the guide, though it does not countermand the Act, can be used on appeal to argue that the FTC has been misleading by including mention of advertiser liability for the false claims of endorsers but specifically excluding mention of the endorsers' liability for the same.
So nothing has changed legally, but they are pulling the wings off a major appeal argument.
Posted by: glasses | November 18, 2009 2:12 AM