FTC blog rules promise big fines, big debate
(NECN: Ted McEnroe) – The Federal Trade Commission has proposed new rules requiring bloggers to disclose if they have been paid or received free goods or services in exchange for reviews. Great idea – but it may have a few flaws. The rules come after a handful of pretty high-profile cases where companies have paid bloggers for positive reviews or tweets about products. The 81-page document includes some examples of what the FTC says needs to be disclosed – for example, a gaming blogger who is given a free console in order to review a game or console; a reviewer on the site Yelp who happens to be an employee of the business he or she is reviewing, and so on. And the fines are serious – as high as $11,000 per post. On the surface, it sounds sensible – and as a number have sites note, it’s the first rewrite of endorsement and testimonial rules since 1980. But blogorati are already flagging the problems. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine dislikes the idea – not because he’s a fan of pay-for-play, but because he says the new rules miss the point. He notes that often the freebies aren’t designed to get an individual favorable review (and he’s right, do you really care if some blogger you have never heard of says that product X works really well?). They’re designed to get enough reviews that the product gracefully floats to the top of Google so that when you search “best thingamabob” that their thingamabob shows up at the top of the search. That, Jarvis notes, is a Google issue, not a blog issue. (And it won’t be solved by the FTC rules as proposed.) Jarvis also says that the millions of bloggers out there don’t think of themselves as mass media. They’re plain folks who are having a conversation, and trying to enforce the rules for them doesn’t make much sense. I’m less convinced by this argument – if you’re trying to persuade someone that something is good, whether its one person or a million of them, you should have to come clean. And then there’s the issue that the disclosures themselves can be ridiculous. Can you fit a comment and disclosure in a 140-character tweet? Not really. Heck, Steve Garfield can barely fit his whole disclosure of a video camera review on a single page. (How did he get a scone from Aer Lingus, anyway?) But he does hit the nail on the head – there is no way that the FTC or anyone else can effectively enforce these rules for hundreds of thousands of bloggers. And an FTC official says as much to CNet’s “The Social” blog. “As a practical matter, we don’t have the resources to look at 500,000 blogs,” the official said. “We don’t even have the resources to monitor a thousand blogs. And if somebody reports violations then we might look at individual cases, but in the bigger picture, we think that we have a reason to believe that if bloggers understand the circumstances under which a disclosure should be made, that they’ll be able to make the disclosure. Right now we’re trying to focus on education.” And that might not be a bad thing. As Jarvis has noted – there is a role for curators of trusted information out there, and getting people to be more transparent. But whether a new set of government rules will address the problem at hand is one that will generate a ton of discussion. Public hearings will be held on the rules December 1 and 2 in Washington, DC. Disclosure: I should disclose that I haven’t received anything (that I can think of) free for any review or topic on my NECN segments. If this problem is so widespread – apparently I’ve missed the boat. But I wouldn’t be able to accept the items anyway.
