Understanding the #lies

Maire Simpson | ms316416@ohio.edu

When logging onto your favorite social media platform, you expect to see truthful, authentic, and genuine posts from your friends and family. We also expect this from our favorite social media influencers and celebrities as well. Deep down, consumers of media rely on the idea of real content that comes from a website with no external pushes or motivation. As consumers, we take things at face value without diving deeper into the truth behind posts and people. With constant new content, our attention spans have shortened, and we do not pay attention to the possible influences or fake people.

Photo by Freestak

#AD Disclosure 

When companies began to see how much pull and weight social media and social media influencers had on consumers, companies started to make deals with these influencers in hopes to persuade consumers to buy their products. Doesn't sound like a big deal right? I mean we see advertising for products everyday on and off social media. So why does it matter that these influencers are being paid to share a product? Unfortunately, due to the personal nature of social media, influencers were getting away with claiming these thoughts and opinions about products or companies as their own and not being transparent about their affiliation with the company. So, people could be scrolling through their favorite Instagram account and see a highly regarded product and assume that the celebrity or influencer really did just absolutely LOVE that product (and they shared a coupon code!). But, little did people know that the influencers were being sponsored or paid hefty sums of money to share these typically fake and dramatized reviews. This was a common practice for many Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube professionals until the FTC caught wind of the practice and decided to create a guideline for transparency so consumers knew when influencers were being paid to share products. As Maura Smith puts it in a Forbes article discussing the importance of transparency: "Without clear distinctions between organic and sponsored content, it can be difficult for an influencer’s followers to determine when they’re being marketed to and when they’re simply engaging with a favorite social star." She further shares the basics of the ad guidelines which are the four P's: 

Prominence: The ability to see if it is a sponsored post.

Presentation: The ad should have clear and concise language that can be understood by consumers.

Placement: The ad disclosure has to be easily seen and not buried in the comments of a post or at the very bottom of a page.

Proximity: Any disclosures about the sponsorship or partnership should be shared along with the product or company being endorsed

With these guidelines, consumers should be able to distinguish the difference between authentic and sponsored content. Unfortunately though, a The Morning Consult revealed a U.K. report that of 800 accounts examined "71.5 percent disclosed their monetary partnerships, but only 25 percent did so in a way that was compliant with the FTC’s recommendations." So we are headed in the right direction towards establishing transparency between influencers and consumers, but we still have a long way to go in order for influencers to fully reveal their motivations behind their posts.