I read an article from the London Times the other day regarding limitations on corporations’ ability to advertise via fake identities. Specifically, creating a false persona to write a blog, create an online video, or head up a website with the sole purpose of advertising the company itself will become illegal within the European Union next year. The idea, I suppose, is to protect the unwary consumer who would be taken in by these positive, glowing reviews and fall for the product or company in question without giving it a second thought.

While I can understand the responsibility that members of the EU parliment feel toward their constituency, the law is stupid. More correctly, the law is superfluous. The question one needs to ask is: do people actually fall for this sort of nonsense—and if so, will making such nonsense illegal actually help? The answer to both questions should be clear.

A “flog”, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a blog set up by a corporation posing as a regular Joe, who just happens to be so enamored by Corporation™’s stuff that they devote their entire online existence to singing them praise. It’s a contraction of “fake” and “blog”—making it a word which is a combination of two words, one of which is a shortening of another word, which itself is a contraction of two words. It doesn’t matter what you call it because it’s a hilarious phenomenon. Think of this: someone has a blog, and the only thing they post on it is how great Company X is? What? If anyone fall for that, frankly, they deserve whatever craptacular service they get.

The other thing the EU legislation is supposed to outlaw is people going on sites like Amazon and rating their own stuff (or the company who paid them) very high. This is harder to trace, but not as big of a deal for reasons I’ll be getting to shortly. The main point is that the EU is attempting to protect us from mean ol’ Corporations™ who will, evidently, deceive millions with their tricky online advertising.

I would suggest this is a problem—if it were happening. Instead, every single company to date who has attempted to put up a flog, or a fake video, or a pro-Company website—ever single one—has been outsted within a manner of days. Not weeks. Not months. Days. Some companies, such as Sony, had their PSP schlock revealed mere hours after the site went live. These “Jus’ folks” campaigns don’t last long enough to appear on most peoples’ radar before they’re revealed as a big scam. No company has been successful with this. None.

In fact, it’s one thing to just be unsuccessful—but the flogging doesn’t end there. Companies which do this—especially the ones who try way too hard, as Sony did—are mocked on the internet stage. It’s not a matter of, “Hey, we figured out who you really are! Haha, nice job.” It’s, “Hey, we figured out who you are. Lame.” What most companies haven’t figured out yet is that there are people online who make a hobby out of figuring out who’s behind internet memes. Since a flog doesn’t help the company if it goes unnoticed, it’s every company’s goal to get the word out there and drive traffic to their site. If a site is popular, Mr. Doesn’t Have Anything Better To Do is going to go straight for the jugular (especially if it’s over-the-top obvious that the site is pro-Company) and figure out just who’s behind the whole ordeal. There are people who live to expose your site for what it is. You can’t beat them. Then there are people like me who just love reading about big companies getting shamed, and we’ll spread the word when the word gets out.

The other method of self-promotion online is to spam your own book on Amazon, or your own stuff on eBay, or wherever, with positive reviews. The biggest problem with this is that it requires such a large effort with such a large number of people in order to be effective, that the site getting slammed is going to recognize it immediately. It’s one thing to tell your friends to spread the word about your stuff. It’s quite another to create an organized attack of positive reviews.

But here’s the biggest reason this doesn’t need to be outlawed. (And it’s not even that the law is inherently unenforcable.) If you have a crappy product and you spam the internet with comments on how great it is, you’re eventually going to get people to buy it. Mission accomplished, right? Not quite. The more people who buy it, the more people there are experiencing it. If it sucks, this means you’re going to have more people online complaining about it. The more people who complain about it, the less effective your positive-review spam is going to be. You’d have to redouble your efforts on the review spam front, but this attracts more people who see that they were disillusioned and post against you. It’s a vicious cycle, and there has yet to be one company that has successfully, continually posted more good reviews than the bad reviews rolling in. On the other hand, if the product is really great, then all the positive-spam—while not necessarily genuine—isn’t false advertising, either. It’s also not needed. The point is, it’s a self-correcting cycle.

But the real reason I’m complaining is that they’re taking away my fun. As I mentioned in my article about chocolate, I love reading about companies getting shamed. It’s pretty much the only thing left that we can do to keep them in line, because it’s rare that anyone in the company is going to go to jail, especially over anything like marketing tactics. Rather, tarnish the brand.

By making it illegal for companies to misrepresent themselves online, you’re making it illegal for them to make stupid marketing decisions. Companies that make stupid marketing decisions (or stupid business decisions) aren’t companies that should be around. Companies who think they’re smart enough to get away with it deserve what they get, namely humiliation on the internet. It’s social Darwinism. Not to mention that the people who would fall for this sort of stuff deserve what they get, too, for not doing the research beforehand. Taking that away? That’s enocouraging stupidity.

-Ted