Bid For Control

“PHILADELPHIA – The Federal Trade Commission will require bloggers to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.

“It is the first time since 1980 that the commission has revised its guidelines on endorsements and testimonials, and the first time the rules have covered bloggers.

“But the commission stopped short of specifying how bloggers must disclose any conflicts of interest.”

This FTC ruling is simply a naked attempt to introduce regulation into the blogosphere. It will not make the blogosphere a better place. It will not help people to “trust” reviews (or distrust them). It will achieve nothing except an opportunity to test out the first in a long line of control-freak laws.

Superficially, it sounds like an attempt to keep the more popular bloggers honest by making sure they declare their financial interests in products they review. But what it actually reveals is a fundamental lack of understanding of how the blogosphere works. In the blogosphere, reputation is everything. Formal review sites are very careful about their posts as their traffic relies on the quality of the review or endorsement. A reputation for dubious review will soon kill such a site. Personal bloggers (at who this law is aimed) also have reputations to maintain. Although a couple of shonky reviews would probably not sink the site, it would certainly get around the internet in short order. People are not as dumb as the FTC seem to think.

Besides this, the situation is analogous to celebrity endorsements on television. Will the FTC insist on celebrities declaring their financial interest in the product? Perhaps a small scrolling banner with the words “Adidas pay me $10 million a year to endorse this shoe”? Perhaps some hurried words at the end of the advert like the “no animals were harmed…” disclaimed.

Sounds to me like the FTC have been taking lessons from NZ’s Electoral Funding Act. And the purpose is, as usual, to quell free speech in the blogosphere by pretending to be doing us a favour.

MacDoctor suggests that, in future, all review articles should have the following line attached:

“I declare I have absolutely no interest in the FTC ruling“

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