Not long ago, unless you were a philosophy student, it might have been rare to come across a discussion of “epistemology”—the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. That’s changed in recent years. In particular, there are lots of stories and analyses about how social media is tearing apart any notion of a shared reality, replacing it with “alternative facts” and allowing each individual to curate their own information bubble.
This epistemological fragmentation makes for bad citizens, and in some cases, bad diets. Obesity may seem less threatening than the end of democracy, but given estimates that the annual cost of treating diet-related disease in the United States today now surpasses $1.1 trillion, we ignore the spread of dietary misinformation at our peril.
That’s why I was happy to learn this week about the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s warning letters to the American Beverage Association, the Canadian Sugar Institute, and a dozen of their paid “influencers.” Many of the influencers are registered dietitians, and they are not shy about touting that fact in their posts.
The ABA paid influencers to post videos on Instagram and Tiktok promoting aspartame’s safety. The posts challenged a decision earlier this year by a World Health Organization committee to categorize the sweetener as a possible carcinogen and instead said things like “a person weighing about 150 pounds will have to consume roughly 75 tabletop packets daily before it can potentially lead to adverse health outcomes.”
The Canadian Sugar Institute paid influencers to post videos on Instagram and Tiktok challenging claims that sugar is unhealthy. One dietitian advised parents to “let [kids] eat as much [candy] as they want” in order to foster a “healthy relationship with food.”
As a parent, I feel qualified to say that unlimited candy fosters no such relationship. But then again, who am I to claim a monopoly on the truth, especially as it relates to candy? Nutrition is complicated. Popular understanding of a healthy diet has rapidly evolved. We once thought trans-fat laden margarine was good for the heart. Indeed, this complexity is what makes the misinformation schemes detailed in the FTC’s letters so insidious. And it is what makes disclosing the nature of commercial speech so critical.
To be clear, the influencers targeted by the FTC included disclosures. That seems to be how the FTC identified them. But the disclosures were not “adequate.” Under the new guidelines that FTC released in June of this year, disclosures must be “clear and conspicuous.” The influencers that received letters failed to meet that standard. For example, they used cryptic hashtags like “Paid partnership with @cndnsugarnutr.” As the FTC pointed out, most consumers do not know that “cndnsugarnutr” means the Canadian Sugar Institute. And even if they did, they might overlook the small text description that appears underneath a video, which itself does not include any disclosure.
Under the FTC’s standards, a disclosure must be “difficult to miss (i.e., easily noticeable) and easily understandable by ordinary consumers.” According to the enforcement letters, the influencers should have included disclosures in the videos themselves, both visually and audibly: “Consumers should be able to notice the disclosure easily, and not have to look for it.”
In other words, posts like the ones targeted in the letters should look like what they are: commercials. Of course, most of us don’t want to watch commercials, and so trade groups and their flunkies will stay busy finding new ways to transmit their sales pitches. Already, marketers are touting the “limitless opportunities for promotion” that virtual reality platforms have to offer, to take just one example.
As the shared reality that we once took for granted slips further away, epistemological guideposts of sorts will become even more important. The notion that advertising should not masquerade as impartial information, and certainly not as impartial dietary advice, is one such very important guidepost. In that sense, this week’s warning letters from FTC can be seen as not just cracking down on a few egregious purveyors of deceptive advertising, but more broadly defending the integrity of public discourse.