The FTC Fights Fraud

The FTC has decided to get into the business of social media and I think this is great news. What they're finding is a tremendous amount of false claims as it relates to disease prevention, especially they saw that during Covid, weight loss products, multi-level marketing. So the FTC has ordered, Meta, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, and Twitch to give them information, every kind of information possible, including their ad revenue, the number of ad views, other performance metrics, including categories of products and services that are more prone to deception. Such as those intended to treat, prevent, or cure substance use disorders and tout income opportunities. The reason for this is, last year consumers reported losing over 1.2 billion in fraud that started on social media. That's the number one place that this is happening. So when we take a look at all these social media initiatives, all these hearings that are taking place, in Congress with these social media companies, maybe we're finally gonna see, something come of it. 

Sally: Yes. It is good that they're taking some action is being taken. Those eight social media companies that they are looking at are Meta, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, and Twitch. And they are some of the companies preying on vulnerable people. With ads that claim to have disease prevention and weight loss. We see this in the multi-level marketing world a lot because they have so many different representatives out there for these multi-level marketing products. I believe we talked about one on the show last year that claim to cure cancer. And so we have to be very discerning about what is being advertised to people because there are a lot of people that are being scammed.

Phil: And I think that if they start with weight loss, multi-level marketing, disease prevention, it's a good solid start that I think everybody can agree to. And then it's quite possible that it'll expand and have some kind of checks and balances on everything that gets posted, which would be great news for us all.