FTC cracking down on blogger payola

[famousringo]

Zlejedi said:

famousringo said:

Zlejedi said:

 

How many small bloggers will not be afraid to write bad review about game x if they know they can be prosecuted for it and in best case they will have to do few hours of paperwork.

It will be much safer to never criticize anyone too much.

You're blowing this out of proportion. They're not going to be flinging lawsuits around challenging every petty remark on the internet, as that would be such a ridiculous waste of time as to make the law unenforcable.

Nobody is going to prosecute unless:

1. There is a provable conflict of interest and

2. The blogger fails to openly disclose it.

There no violation of freedom of speech, because people are still free to say whatever they like. But if they speak about a subject which involves their livelihood, they have to add a little bit of information which they might otherwise prefer to be left unsaid.

Is it a violation of freedom of speech when political ads are forced to disclose who paid for the ad?

Of course there will be lawsuits it's only a matter of finding company which will be asshole enough to try to hunt all negative opinions about it's product (activision comes as first possible candidate to the mind)

And for most cases it will be same autocensorship as ESRB introduced to games - where authors are afraid of putting risky content in fear of receiving AO.

With no evidence at all of a conflict of interest? If that was a viable tactic for silencing critics, why doesn't Activision just accuse their enemies of violating some law that's already on the books? Oh yeah, wrongful prosecution.

I'm not sure what that last sentence has to do with anything, since it's a case of voluntary self-censorship. The ESRB is an industry organization, not a government regulatory body, and nobody is forcing developers not to make AO games. Heck, I'd argue that there's been far more sex and violence in video games after the founding of the ESRB than there ever had been before it.