Oh, say can you say? — VOICES for REASON

Would you stake $11,000 on your ability to read the mind of a faceless bureaucrat? Well, you’re going to have to come December 1, if you decide to blog about books or other products.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued new guidelines that force bloggers who receive cash or “in-kind” payments to review a book or product to disclose that fact. What does that mean in practice? That’s a good question. According to the FTC’s press release, decisions will be reached on a “case-by-case basis.” In an interview with FTC representative Richard Cleland, blogger Edward Champion asks about various scenarios regarding when disclosure would be required:

I presented many hypothetical scenarios in an effort to determine where Cleland stood. He didn’t see any particular problem with a book review appearing on a blog, but only if there wasn’t a corresponding Amazon Affiliates link or an advertisement for the book.

In cases where a publisher is advertising one book and the blogger is reviewing another book by the same publisher, Cleland replied, “I don’t know. I would reserve judgment on that. My initial reaction to it is that it doesn’t seem like a relationship.”

[…]

“These are very complex situations that are going to have to looked at on a case-by-case basis to determine whether or not there is a sufficient nexus, a sufficient compensation between the seller and the blogger, and so what we have done is to provide some guidance in this area. And some examples in this area where there’s an endorsement.”

So let’s review. Bloggers must now obey guidelines which are so “complex” that even the FTC doesn’t know exactly what they mean, and will have to decide on a “case-by-case basis.”

I recommend reading the entire post, as well as the comments, to get a sense of the endless questions these policies raise. But not to worry: the FTC will inevitably “clarify” their rules with a never-ending series of elaborations, definitions, arcane legal distinctions, and arbitrary exceptions, which you will be expected to wade through if you should be so recalcitrant as to discuss books and products online.

Once these guidelines go into effect, bloggers will face the same kind of incomprehensible, non-objective restrictions on speech that currently plague our political process thanks to campaign finance laws. Just as those laws have chilled political speech, so these will inevitably chill commercial speech.

What is the supposedly dire threat from which we are being “protected”? The possibility that unscrupulous bloggers will write false positive reviews and thereby dupe us into buying products we would not have otherwise bought. (Apparently, we cannot be trusted to evaluate the reliability of a reviewer on our own.) But while there is no such thing as a “right” not to read insincere product reviews, there certainly is a right to free speech. That’s what really needs protecting.

Image: Wikipedia Commons