CinemaSquid has drawn my attention to a report that the US Federal Trade Commission has set rules requiring ‘Consumer-generated media’ ‘to disclose if they are being compensated by a manufacturer, advertiser, or service provider when they review an item’.
Apparently Consumer-generated media are bloggers. If you fail to disclose, you could be fined up to $US11,000.
It will be interesting to see how this works across jurisdictions. I am in Australia, writing primarily about Australian stuff, but my website is hosted by a US company (Hosting Matters), and for all I know it keeps its servers somewhere else in the world.
Well, I get paid for my reviews. But by the publications for which I write, not the equipment suppliers. I don’t get to keep the stuff I review (I’d be very, very rich indeed if I did, since I estimate I review about $AUS200,000 worth of stuff each year). I do on rare occasions buy equipment after the event at rather better than retail prices.
Various companies also fly me hither and thither, which tends to cost me since it means little or no productive writing at the time. Full disclosures here.
As to the substance of these legal changes, I am not happy.
These kinds of actions are the sorts of things governments do to be seen to be doing something. If the aim is to discourage the writing of incorrect things, then this can have only the slightest of effects because corruption is just one of many causes of false statements. Others, not so readily subject to regulation, are self-delusion, ideology and so on.
I don’t like this at all. I hate government regulation, especially when it impinges upon liberties such as free expression. The correct punishment for a corrupt blogger should be explosure and the derision of all. As it should be for those who write blatantly false material for other, non-pecuniary, reasons.
But, then, I’m very close to a free speech absolutist.
UPDATE (Friday, 9 October 2009, 12:43 pm): One of my editors, Greg Borrowman from Australian HI-FI, disagrees, and makes some interesting points:
I’m with you on the less government control the better, but where do you draw the line?Advertisers in the US are now paying bloggers to make statements and claims about their products that are untrue, but because said bloggers appear to ordinary consumers to be ‘ordinary consumers just like them, and completely impartial’, those ordinary consumers are more likely to believe such claims than they would be if the same claims were made in a commercial environment. (And the advertisers aren’t liable at law for the misinformation.) It’s not exactly a small market either: US advertisers paid bloggers US$1.35 billion in 2007!
I have read so much complete bullshit written by bloggers about hi-fi products, where they have been wrong about materials/drivers/country of origin/person who designed them/other people who own them etc etc etc that it gets very depressing… especially when such wrong information is then recycled as an ‘advertisement’ and in press releases by local distributors!