Will the FTC Start Keeping Up With Kim Kardashian's Twitter Sponsorships?
Bootlylicious celebrity personality Kim Kardashian is reportedly padding her wallet these days via sorta-secret paid endorsements on the brain-blip micro-blogging service, Twitter. Kardashian supposedly rakes in an astounding $10,000 per sponsored Tweet. Thanks to new disclosure rules on paid Internet endorsements, those undisclosed sponsors could get Kardashian in trouble with the FTC, which could fine her up to $11,000 per infringement.
Yet as The Big Money's Mark Gimein argues at his depressingly-not-hot-dog-themed blog, The Sausage, "it's hard to get too riled up about it; protecting folks from Kardashian's sponsored fashion advice seems beyond the scope of what the government can reasonably be expected to do." And anyway, it's tough to argue that there's anything terribly misleading going on: Reading her Tweets, it's plenty easy to tell who many of the sponsors are: Reebok, the DASH fashion boutique, and Carl's Jr., a fast-food joint that also pays Kardashian to appear in commercials that the Huffington Post (somewhat accurately) describes as "salad porn":
Follow sponsor-free endorsements and news from Reason's staff on the Twitter here. And for more on the idiocy of the FTC's new disclosure rules, read Matt Welch, Tim Cavanaugh, and yours truly.
