You’ll have heard, the Federal Commerce Fee announced that they’ve formally banned pretend opinions and AI-generated pretend opinions. However will this really find yourself doing something?
That is what the FTC wrote, The ultimate rule prohibits:
- Faux or False Client Opinions, Client Testimonials, and Movie star Testimonials: The ultimate rule addresses opinions and testimonials that misrepresent that they’re by somebody who doesn’t exist, equivalent to AI-generated pretend opinions, or who didn’t have precise expertise with the enterprise or its services or products, or that misrepresent the expertise of the individual giving it. It prohibits companies from creating or promoting such opinions or testimonials. It additionally prohibits them from shopping for such opinions, procuring them from firm insiders, or disseminating such testimonials, when the enterprise knew or ought to have identified that the opinions or testimonials had been pretend or false.
- Shopping for Optimistic or Damaging Opinions: The ultimate rule prohibits companies from offering compensation or different incentives conditioned on the writing of shopper opinions expressing a specific sentiment, both optimistic or detrimental. It clarifies that the conditional nature of the supply of compensation or incentive could also be expressly or implicitly conveyed.
- Insider Opinions and Client Testimonials: The ultimate rule prohibits sure opinions and testimonials written by firm insiders that fail to obviously and conspicuously disclose the giver’s materials connection to the enterprise. It prohibits such opinions and testimonials given by officers or managers. It additionally prohibits a enterprise from disseminating such a testimonial that the enterprise ought to have identified was by an officer, supervisor, worker, or agent. Lastly, it imposes necessities when officers or managers solicit shopper opinions from their very own quick family members or from staff or brokers – or after they inform staff or brokers to solicit opinions from family members and such solicitations lead to opinions by quick family members of the workers or brokers.
- Firm-Managed Assessment Web sites: The ultimate rule prohibits a enterprise from misrepresenting {that a} web site or entity it controls offers impartial opinions or opinions a couple of class of services or products that features its personal services or products.
- Assessment Suppression: The ultimate rule prohibits a enterprise from utilizing unfounded or groundless authorized threats, bodily threats, intimidation, or sure false public accusations to forestall or take away a detrimental shopper evaluate. The ultimate rule additionally bars a enterprise from misrepresenting that the opinions on a evaluate portion of its web site symbolize all or many of the opinions submitted when opinions have been suppressed based mostly upon their rankings or detrimental sentiment.
- Misuse of Faux Social Media Indicators: The ultimate rule prohibits anybody from promoting or shopping for pretend indicators of social media affect, equivalent to followers or views generated by a bot or hijacked account. This prohibition is proscribed to conditions wherein the customer knew or ought to have identified that the indications had been pretend and misrepresent the customer’s affect or significance for a industrial goal.
However as Greg Sterling posted on X, “The brand new FTC rule “banning” pretend opinions and testimonials will assist deal with evaluate fraud. However there is no legal responsibility or formal obligations for Google, and so on. (see Part 230). Meaning platform enforcement will stay sporadic and piecemeal. Most likely BAU.”
So we’ll see what occurs however I do hope pretend opinions get more durable and occur much less typically…
Discussion board dialogue at X.
