FTC Eyes a Crackdown on Influencers and Advertisers Who Target Kids

The Federal Trade Commission held an occasion Wednesday targeted on the issue of “stealth” promoting in content material geared in the direction of kids, the place it’s troublesome to distinguish between advertising and common content material. In the opening hours of the day-long occasion, the fee offered a glimpse into its pondering on the difficulty, and indicated that new regulatory efforts could also be on the horizon.

“When kids interact with digital media, they’re exposed to an array of marketing practices that blur the line between advertising and entertainment. That’s an especially serious issue when we’re talking about young people,” FTC chairperson Lina Khan mentioned on the occasion. “Developing brains are more susceptible to deceptive or harmful practices, and the immediate, and long-term effects can be significant.”

Khan mentioned the FTC is exploring an replace to the guidelines for implementing the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The fee is already within the means of updating its guidelines about industrial surveillance extra broadly.

The traces between promoting and leisure are hazier than ever earlier than. The rise of influencers gives a large swath of examples during which common content material is usually indistinguishable from paid promotions. TikTok, for one, has made a substantial effort to push influencers as a advertising alternative, and the platform just lately rolled out a number of promoting methods that make it tougher to acknowledge if you’re watching an advert. The downside crops up in video games and different apps as effectively, the place builders strain customers into making in-app purchases.

Advertising isn’t simply laborious to detect, it’s more and more laborious to outline, Khan warned.

“What particularly concerns the FTC is the fact that kids often cannot tell the difference between ads and organic content,” Khan mentioned. Among the potential threats, Khan highlighted advertisements that deliberately exploit children’ insecurities, and the truth that kids can find yourself making transactions or offering private data with out realizing it or understanding the dangers.

The enterprise of youngsters’ promoting has been on the federal authorities’s radar for the a long time, however regulators have usually been stymied of their makes an attempt to handle the difficulty.

In the late Nineteen Seventies, the FTC truly banned all TV promoting to children youthful than 8, and prohibited sure sorts of advertisements aimed in the direction of older kids. The transfer was controversial, and congress revoked the FTC’s rulemaking authority on kids’s promoting in 1980. The Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) has some authority over children promoting, and truly limits the quantity of minutes per hour that may be spent on advertisements on kids’s tv. Even there, children reveals that constructed round sure toys (consider the Smurfs or Transformers) are an exception so long as they’re not actually advertisements.

But the regulation that provides the FCC that authority solely applies to TV, and doesn’t handle on-line video or different kinds of digital content material. That leaves regulators with few instruments to control children’ media in a second the place the quantity of content material out there to younger individuals is rising at an exponential price.

It’s an issue that’s manner larger than children’ points. Few guidelines govern the web, particularly on the federal degree. Lawyers and regulators are left to try to match the few, antiquated legal guidelines on the books to a digital world that’s moved manner past what legislators have been capable of cowl.

COPPA is the one federal regulation that defines what content material is directed at kids, in accordance with Mamie Kresses, vp of the Children’s Advertising Review Unit at BBB National Programs, who spoke at Wednesday’s occasion. That leaves the FTC with a blunt instrument with which to handle the issues in children advertisements. COPPA is a privateness regulation, not an promoting regulation, although the advertisements and privateness are inextricable on-line. It stays to be seen how far the FTC can stretch the boundaries of its authority to handle these issues.

Protecting kids on-line is one subject everybody appears to agree on, no matter political affiliation. Legislators throughout the globe have handed and proposed quite a lot of legal guidelines on the difficulty in recent times. The UK’s Children’s Code earned TikTok a possible $29 million greenback superb this yr, and California simply handed an analogous regulation this yr.

So far the FTC has been characteristically obscure about its plans for additional regulation, however the fee is clearly wanting to crack down on what it sees as manipulative and probably harmful promoting. They could have new avenues to pursue that form of enforcement within the close to future.