It may be more practical for FTC to encourage bloggers to claim not having received free products or payment instead of asking them to disclose having received free things.
FTC’s new disclosure rule tries to educate and protect consumers. It requires bloggers who endorse certain merchandise or services to disclose when they receive free product or payment from the related company. But the rule is difficult to implement because it is impossible to oversee millions of bloggers. FTC also faces possible lawsuits, as Professor Ryan mentioned in class. Since the First Amendment protects individuals’ freedom of speech, FTC may be challenged by whether or not it can force bloggers to make the disclosure.
A possible solution is to do the opposite. Instead of asking bloggers to disclose when they have received free product and/or financial payment, FTC should encourage bloggers who are not sponsored or paid by anyone to claim they are independent. The latter approach, I called “the positive approach”, has several advantages:
First, it is almost always easier for people to announce the things they feel proud of rather than to disclose the things they don’t feel proud of. The best ethical rules are the ones which approach the positive side of human nature.
Second, in making the “positive approach”, the FTC can avoid possible lawsuits relating to freedom of speech.
Lastly, when bloggers state that they are not sponsored by any corporations or advertisers, it reminds naïve readers like me that other bloggers who do not make similar claims may be endorsed by their sponsors. Regardless, it is still possible to believe a blogger’s reviews or recommendations even though we know he/she receives free things from the related companies. For example, even though I am aware that Oprah Winfrey may receive free product samples from many companies, I still trust her judgment and objectivity when she recommends “Oprah’s favorite things” in her show, magazine and website. However, generally speaking, readers will be more skeptical when they know that a blogger has received free product and/or payment from the related company.
NB C-notes
14 years ago
1 comment:
Do you think it might be more effective for the FTC to instead require the companies who supply bloggers with free stuff to report the gift, instead? There are fewer corporate sponsors than bloggers, so this might be an easier way for the agency to keep track. Perhaps the sponsors could be required to report the gifts to the IRS, with tax deduction for the gifts as an incentive to comply.
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