Instagram Made A Feature To Disclose Celebrity #Sponsored Posts
Instagram Made A Feature To Disclose Celebrity #Sponsored Posts
Buzzfeed News
Katie Notopoulos
Today, Instagram launches a feature that will allow celebrities and “influencers” to make it more clear when they’re doing a post that is sponsored by a brand. The new tool will say “Paid partnership with…” at the top of a sponsored post or Story.
But a representative for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen told BuzzFeed News the group isn’t impressed. “We are happy to see that Instagram has the ability to create a feature that helps to identify posts as advertisements, but this new feature does not address the problem of undisclosed paid ads,” said Public Citizen. The sticky wicket here is the term partnership. The FTC thinks that simply hashtagging #partner is unclear.
“If it wants to help identify paid ads on its platform, Instagram should create a system that makes advertisements clear to all users and is compliant with the FTC’s policy. Otherwise, Instagram is enabling deceptive influencer marketing.”