Question

As blogs and celebrity testimonials have proliferated across the media landscape, so have efforts by businesses and manufacturers to gain positive mentions, reviews, and commentary on these seemingly grassroots sites. What ethical issues are raised if a blogger is paid to comment on a product? Does it matter if the blogger discloses any financial agreements? Be specific with your answer.

Answer 1

Over the years, blogging is used as a great social media tool to impact business and related economics. In most countries companies that exist take the help of some or the other form of social media, because of its ever expanding role in creating positive psychology for the customers. Thus enabling better sales and reviews for the company.

Bloggers and celebrities tend to have a big impact on purchase decisions by common public which usually tend to associate this as a sign of superiority of the product or brand in which they invest in.

However, that said, the problem of paid reviews is slowly and gradually crippling the industry as a whole. While testimonies by celebs and bloggers alike tend to form a pattern or a review of the product which the consumer may opt to purchase, in the long run it causes more problems than not in the ethical sense of things.

Ethically speaking, the biggest problem in celebrities and bloggers engaging themselves in paid reviews or testimonials is that they themselves tend to have little or no knowledge of the offering and people buy this just out of the fact that their favorite blogger or celebrity has purchased an item and can be trusted upon.

The biggest example of this in the recent times is the Fyre Festival which was hosted by a young entrepreneur and ended up being a disaster in which people lost millions of dollars. Models for this was hired for promotions which indeed looked much better than the final product which the customers ended up in purchasing.

This highlights the very essence of ethical issues associated with financial agreements for paid reviews and testimonials that in most cases celebrities or bloggers just work for the money they get without bothering too much about the net result of such an arrangement. Without having proper insight about the product or service being offered, they blindly sell the product to consumers who do not tend to know this arrangement.

Even if a blogger were to disclose his financial agreement, in most cases the problem is the recommendation itself.

For example a lot of YouTube channels have sprung up which give knowledge about technical gadgets and even when these bloggers are heavily sponsored and most people know of the same, the trust which they build with their audience is not reflected in product reviews in most cases.

Through this strategy, the companies tend to sway attention on specific products for the end consumer and put bad mouthing bloggers at bay. This causes an ethical problem of conflict of interest also.

Please feel free to ask your doubts in the comments section.