Bloggers Beware: Disclose Freebies Recieved or Risk Being Fined up to $11,000 by the FTC!

Yesterday, the Federal Trade commission announced that Bloggers will have to disclose information of ‘freebies’ given to them in exchange of writing a review about a particular product.

This is the first time ever that the FTC have interfered and now they have started to regulate blogging and make it more of a fair review, not biased.

The rules are due to being on Dec 1st and violating them could lead to a fine of up to a massive $11,000. Not many average bloggers including me could afford to even pay half of that sum.

Richard Cleland, assistant director of FTC’s advertising practices division said that reviews should be “clear and conspicuous,” whether it is in text, picture or video form.

But is this rule really here just to scare and penalize bloggers or crack down on dodgy advertisers?

Whatever happened to free speech? Will blogging ever be the same? I thought a blog was to exercise your right of free speech and share your thoughts on particular subjects with the world.

I promise that I will always continue to find  good web-applications and say what I think about them. Clean and simple. For those of you bloggers out there just here for a few months to make some quick bucks and get out of here… Bad luck ^^.