It’s great when more people join in promoting public health or personal precautions. But it’s not so great if the only reason they’re joining in is to target the already cautious with junk marketing. What’s happening sometimes is that these influencers are saying things we want to hear to get us as an audience, so then they can sell us something. Often influencers and social media professionals build up an audience in a particular niche and then either sell their social media account as having a certain audience built, or then are in a position to advertise that they can reach a certain audience.
That’s NOT to say anyone who is interested in any item or a topic is up to a sales con. But the bad actors are going to make it easy to smear the decent real people just trying to help other people online. For example, there are well established things that are effective in preventing infectious disease spread, like N95 masks. But someone actually showed me a post on social media where someone was hand wringing and claiming that people promoting caution around virus spread supposedly must have investments in N95 companies. Wow. Nicolas Smit has articulated quite openly how trying to promote and advocate for elastomeric respirators was not very successful for him – he was shadowbanned on social media after raising issues about how advertising of respirators, including N95s, was prohibited and censored long after there were no more shortages.
Sometimes the most obvious explanation is that an immuncompromised person wants to stay alive, or that maybe someone doesn’t have any sick time and can’t afford to be off work sick all the damn time, and that’s why they wish other people would join them and put on a mask.
The bottom line is that promoting a product isn’t in itself the problem. I object to promoting products that are not science-based and proven, or potentially dangerous. But what I’m talking about here is that the biggest problem on social media particularly is when that product promotion is done dishonestly, and disguised as a “personal testimony” when it’s really a paid product placement. The way to solve this is making disclosure mandatory… It already is legally in the U.S. — all social media influencers and bloggers are supposed to disclose if they’re receiving payment for product mentions. But I mean we should also create a culture where it’s socially mandatory. Because the problem is that most of the time you don’t even know where the influencer really lives or what laws apply. And sure, people can lie anyway. But we could normalize asking and expecting disclosure one way or another, because it’s one thing for someone to not disclose compensation for promoting something when they’re supposed to by law — it’s another level if they actually have to proactively lie about it.
So I just thought I’d proactively “disclose” my “incentives” and my reasoning. The only way I’ve “invested in” N95s is for my health, in that I wear them, whenever or wherever the need arises, to avoid virus exposure, wildfire smoke pollution, allergens, etc. I have no financial investment in PPE stock or whatnot. And I have not taken money to advertise anything. I’ve never even been approached to advertise PPE.