UK Targets Twitter and Blog Endorsements 77
krou writes "The UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is cracking down on 'Twitter users and bloggers using their online presence to endorse products and companies without clearly stating their relationship with the brand.' They described such endorsements, including 'comments about services and products on blogs and microblogs such as Twitter,' as 'deceptive' under fair trading rules. While the US Federal Trade Commission already requires such endorsements to be labelled with 'ad' or 'spon,' the UK doesn't have any such requirement. In relation to this, the OFT has launched an investigation into Handpicked Media, because the OFT is 'insisting that it must clearly state when promotional comments have been paid for.'"
Good luck (Score:3, Insightful)
Ethics (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a shame, if not altogether ironic that the government feels the need to legislate ethics.
I also wonder whether users would be obliged to indicate if they were a competitor of a company, before slagging it off online.
Re:I you belive some random dude (Score:4, Insightful)
something i miss (Score:4, Insightful)
I miss the more innocent age of the internet before there was astroturfing.
These days, I more or less assume any favorable opinion about a commercial product is astroturfed, unless I have compelling evidence to the contrary.
Re:Good luck (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good luck (Score:2, Insightful)
" For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."-Albert
Yeah and they call it the War on Drugs or they call it the War on Piracy.
Re:I you belive some random dude (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I you belive some random dude (Score:3, Insightful)
It's whether there is any deception involved.
If they're falsely pretending to be a satisfied customer that has no ties with the seller, then that's deception.
There's no need to resort to fancy reasons/analogies to figure out why it's wrong, or to try to justify it. Same goes with judging other money-making schemes people think of- is there deceit involved? The intentions also matter.
Nothing wrong with making money.
Re:Good luck (Score:2, Insightful)
Who says it can't be enforced?
It cannot be perfectly enforced, but then no other law can either. The obvious way to catch people doing this is to just hope that they're stupid, but even if not, all it takes is one irritated ex-employee to say "I spent the last six months pretending to be a satisified customer. Here are my fake account details, here are details of what I was paid for it."
As long as there's a risk of being caught, you'll prevent a lot of it from happening.
Re:Good Grief (Score:4, Insightful)
The "Like" thing is usually true, or they just want to see the hidden picture / enter the competition that requires them to "like" it first. However, the "this sucks" portion is generally not true. If someone says something sucks on such sites, they *normally* think it does.
However, the MUCH bigger question - what idiot listens to their Facebook/Twitter friend's opinion when they are buying something for themselves, without at least asking *WHY* it sucks? People always tell me that X sucks but with no explanation. People still can't explain to me why, all of a sudden, Windows XP sucks. Or OpenOffice sucks. Or Opera sucks. If they provide reasons, those reasons are usually exactly WHY I want to use it (i.e. Opera has a built-in mail client and doesn't execute ActiveX). They normally don't like it, or it's not suited to their way of working, or it has problems they don't like, or (infinitely more likely) they haven't *really* given it a fair chance and it's fashionable to say anything non-standard sucks. That's *their* opinion and doesn't automatically mean that everyone works the same or, even if they do, that they will find it as sucky.
There are friends I have that, if they HATE a movie, I'm almost guaranteed to like it and vice versa. There are friends who piss their money away on gadgets that I think are useless or that don't suit my method of working at all. There is no point in me owning a machine that I can't easily write my own software for, for example - so their iPods and iPhones and iBooks are effectively a "games console" computer in my opinion, whereas my old XP image that's followed me onto four different laptops is much better AND plays all the games I want. They don't see it that way so my "old, sucky" laptop whose efficiency and speed WOULD be destroyed within a few months of *their* use of the same machine through mismanagement is actually perfect for me.
We bought the head of the school I work at an iPad when he retired. He was an old-school computing guy, though, so he sold it on eBay shortly afterwards. But the 600MHz Mini-ITX with triple boot DOS, Linux and Windows XP that I built for him, with built-in Soundblaster compatibility, was a million times more suitable and he took it with him to his house in the South of France. To anyone else, it probably "sucked", but for him it was perfect. I have friends that only buy Sony. I have friends that spend money on Farmville. I have friends that live by their iPhone and yet can't work out how to use 1% of it's functions. I have friends that can't operate my laptop because the touchpad (again, personal preference) is slightly offset to the left and doesn't have a defined scroll area, but it's perfect for me, because Autoplay is completely disable, and because to play a DVD you have to load VLC manually. I have a friend who only buys whatever Which magazine tells him to buy.
"Suckiness" is dependent on the user. Opinions matter but only of those people whose opinions matter to me. The chances of random "Yeah, this is cool" or "This sucks" actually affecting *ANYTHING* I do are incredibly minimal unless it's backed up by reasoning, experience and trust. You have to weight each opinion by those factors and if you do that, any astroturfing will actually end up on the bottom of the pile rather than the top. And even among the people I speak to the most, there are some where I wouldn't *touch* anything they recommended because they are inherently different to me. The person I know who works at Rackspace has been brainwashed, so I instantly discredit their opinion on hosting and network hardware because they try to simulate the datacentre they work in inside everyone's house including their own - it's *not* suitable for the majority of cases and even when it *is* suitable, I happen to think that Rackspace suck and most of what they do internally sucks. If I didn't discredit their opinion, I'd basically be up to my nose in overly expensive Cisco hardware and yet have substandard capabilities compared to what I hav
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is with all of the laws that we have that there is _no_ intention of enforcing. Want a really good chance at a valid copyright case? Just arrest anyone walking around with a portable media player. We have no right to rip music from CDs that we own to digital formats, so the chances are that most people on the streets today are law breakers. But we have this law anyway.
Bad laws only serve to bring all law into disrepute.