I have some news that will absolutely shock you. Turns out some influencers have been up to dodgy stuff. I know! Never would have guessed. It’s gotten to the point where the US government has had to actually step in and waste a bunch of time telling them to pull their heads in.
To backtrack a bit, remember how Instagram brought in rules a couple of years ago that made it really easy to spot when a post was actually sponsored content? The posts that come up with “paid partnership” above them. It’s been working really well so far, so naturally people have been coming up with ways to get around it.
Apparently people have been burying the part where they tell their followers that they’re being paid for a post somewhere random in their profile or under a pile of hashtags. Because seriously, who is going to go digging through 800 #blessed #summer #mood hashtags to find the one #ad hashtag? Nobody, that’s who.
This has become common enough that the Federal Trade Commission over in the USA has gone to the effort of putting together and publishing an entire online guide on how not to illegally advertise. Which it turns out isn’t hard at all, literally all it involves is telling people that you got money for a post. That. Is. It.
There’s even a video of some poor attorney explaining the very basic steps. This woman went to law school, somehow I don’t think she spent her graduation day dreaming of the day she’d be explaining how to sell skinny tea properly.
We’ve caught influencers doing questionable stuff to sell things before. Remember that time people thought than a woman went to the lengths of staging an entire motorbike crash as a part of sponsored content?
As far as I can tell, nobody else has gone quite that far yet, but who knows. Maybe some poor government lawyer will be telling us not to fake vehicle accidents sooner than we think.