Along with prohibiting reviews written by nonhumans, the FTC’s rule also forbids companies from paying for either positive or negative reviews to falsely boost or denigrate a product. It also forbids marketers from exaggerating their own influence by, for example, paying for bots to inflate their follower count.
Violations of the rule could result in fines being issued for each violation, according to the rule. This means that for an e-commerce site with hundreds of thousands of reviews, penalties for fake or manipulated reviews could quickly add up.
So how are they going to detect, proof, and enforce?
unclear (they don’t tend to announce enforcement mechanisms in these and it’s not a final rule until it’s a final rule), but it’s not like the FTC is lacking in power as an agency
Probably by taking down the companies doing it rather than the people using them. Just set up an account and ask around for where to buy some likes.
LOL at the comments suggesting nothing should be done because this is hard to enforce.
That reasoning is why we don’t have legal abortion, universal health care, a living wage, or term limits.
Some things may be hard to do. It’s no excuse not to try.
Their heart is in the right place, but good luck doing anything about it
Extremely based, good job FTC
