The Internet: When a blog is actually an ad

“When we think about power-mad federal agencies, the Federal Trade Commission rarely comes to mind,” said Jack Shafer in Slate.com. But the consumer-protection agency has just embarked on a massive effort to regulate what millions of Americans write and read on the Internet. In the name of protecting us from unscrupulous marketers, the FTC last week issued new rules that require bloggers and users of social networks like Facebook to reveal whether they received any freebies or compensation from companies whose products or services they mention—as a growing number of them do. The failure to disclose could result in an $11,000 fine per “incident.” The FTC insists it’s not interested in “hounding bloggers,” but its new rules are so murky that just about anyone who expresses an opinion about a product online could become a “suspect.”

“It’s about time that somebody tried to force greater transparency about the Web’s often murky quid pro quos,” said James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times. Many companies now pay bloggers and Twitterers to subtly push their products, and the FTC is simply saying that such “hucksterism” must be disclosed to readers. A company called Mom Central Consulting, for instance, is one of several that put national brands in the hands of “mommy bloggers,” who post their usually glowing reviews “in exchange for gifts as small as a few coupons or as extravagant as a new dishwasher.” Critics say the FTC is pushing for “government censorship of the Internet,” said the Palm Beach, Fla., Post in an editorial. But information found on the Internet is “notoriously unreliable,” with no clear way of knowing whether it was put there by someone hoping to sell you something. “The FTC isn’t trying to regulate free speech. It’s trying to regulate paid-for-speech, aka advertisements.”

Yes, it’s sleazy when bloggers take payments to tout products, said blogger Jeff Jarvis in Buzzmachine.com. But print publications get freebies all the time—from gadgets to travel junkets. Why impose rules on a blog that writes about travel but not on a magazine or newspaper? In any event, much of what takes place in cyberspace is closer in spirit to a “conversation” than to “media.” For the FTC to target bloggers and social media “is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth, and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria you just endorsed.”

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