Misleading consumers in social media

By Espinosa Bellido Abogados

The Commission for the Control of Unfair Competition of the Peruvian IP Office (Indecopi) published a draft guide on digital advertising and recommendations for influencers, which seeks to state when a product, brand or service is tagged, linked or endorsed in any way, misleading followers and breaking consumer protection law.

In Peru, the National Advertising Self-Regulation Council (Conar) states that an influencer is a person who, enjoying recognition in digital environments, is followed in social networks by a number of users over which such person has the ability to influence, affect or motivate. In many cases, followers are not able to identify when an influencer message is advertising content or an authentic post.

Thus, Indecopi’s draft guide establishes that the influencer must clearly express which of its messages are advertising content. According to Indecopi, people need to know if influencers have been paid, incentivised or in any way rewarded to endorse or review something in their posts. To do that, they must use the hashtags #advertising or #contractadvertising in those posts. Such hashtags must be easily identifiable and understandable in the posts.

The goal of the guide is to clear the relationship of influencers with a brand or business to avoid misleading followers. “It’s important you don’t give the impression that you are just a consumer when you are actually acting for your own business purposes or on behalf of a brand or other business”, the guide states. Without appropriate disclosure, people may reasonably assume that an influencer who is promoting, endorsing or reviewing a product or a service, does not have a relationship with the businesses they are promoting. They may think that an influencer has purchased the product themselves and therefore considers it good value for money or of good quality.