The ultimate ruling from an FTC choice made in August that may fight pretend opinions and testimonials by prohibiting their sale or buy entered into impact at this time.
Throughout a proposal and remark interval lasting from November 2023 to June 2024, the FTC discovered that the ruling had broad help.
FTC Chair Lina Khan said that pretend opinions are a nasty diversion away from sincere enterprise in the direction of nefarious suppliers and sellers who waste folks’s money and time.
“By strengthening the FTC’s toolkit to battle misleading promoting, the ultimate rule will defend Individuals from getting cheated, put companies that unlawfully recreation the system on discover, and promote markets which can be honest, sincere, and aggressive,” stated the chairwoman in an announcement.
The ultimate rule in actual wording addresses opinions and testimonials that misrepresent that they’re by somebody truly exists, however the truth is, doesn’t. This would come with AI-generated pretend opinions, those that 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 have been pretend or false.
With an exception for clear and actually conveyed messaging, the ruling prohibits companies from offering compensation or different incentives conditioned on the writing of shopper opinions expressing a selected sentiment, both constructive or destructive.
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It additionally prohibits sure opinions and testimonials written by firm insiders that fail to obviously and conspicuously disclose the reviewer’s materials connection to the enterprise.
The ruling additionally took into consideration how a enterprise or service may dishonestly attempt to management or obscure undesirable opinions.
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As such, it prohibits companies from utilizing unfounded or groundless authorized threats, bodily threats, intimidation, or sure false public accusations to forestall or take away a destructive shopper assessment, and from misrepresenting that the opinions on its web site signify all or a lot of the opinions submitted when opinions have been suppressed based mostly upon their low rankings or destructive sentiment.
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