Keep your hands off my social media FTC!

Yesterday, the FTC announced on its website that “it has approved final revisions to the guidance it gives to advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act.”  Buried within the announcements is a new guideline for social media.  It states:

The revised Guides also make it clear that celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.

You have got to be kidding me.  Social media is conversations.  If we start down this path of regulating what has to be said in social networking, where will it end?  Will celebrities have to announce all of their brand relationships anytime they have a conversation with someone?  What if Shaq sings the national anthem at the ball game and then tells everyone he’s about to go eat a hotdog, does he need to announce that he is a sponsor for Oscar Meyer?

And who is a celebrity at this point?  Are we going to have rules that anyone with X amount of followers or connections on a social network has to provide this kind of information too?

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this but to me, we’re going down a very dangerous path here and I think the FTC has made a big mistake.  Social media isn’t something that should be governed like this.

Tagged as: FTC, guidelines, social media