The SOAP people openly admitted to me at comic-con that they faked material. That's as close to confirmed as possible without open admission by the company. I believe "snakes on a flying machine", the old timey version of the movie, is one such (well-done) example.

Yeah, I recall that they quietly claimed credit for All Your Snakes Are Belong To Us as well. I would argue that there's a distinction between creating entire fake blogs and fake personas to inhabit those blogs, and creating the occasional piece of fake content for a pre-existing community. Throwing out a piece of ephemera every now and again doesn't strike me as being all that problematic.

In the case of Snakes on a Plane, they were essentially playing the same game as everyone else. They came up with a clever idea and made something funny, submitting it into an ecosystem of other funny creations. They didn't start that game, and they didn't control it. While the content wasn't strictly created by 'fans', it also didn't claim to be from fans. It was merely something in the ecosystem. Maybe there's some dishonesty there, but I'd consider it minor at best.

Sony, on the other hand, as well the recent McDonald and Walmart examples, are much different, and much more dishonest. They created fake people, or people with fake backgrounds. They lied about who they were and they lied about what they were doing. Those people put forward false opinions and attempted to create interest in something that nobody was especially interested in through trickery. They didn't tap into something that already existed, they attempted to create something from scratch when in fact they had nothing but a big bucket of phony.

You could convince me that what New Line did but quietly releasing a few pieces of artwork into the world was bad/dishonest... but at worst it was mildly problematic. If we were drawing a spectrum, there'd be a great deal of space between them and Sony/Walmart/McDonalds.

I don't think government should regulate fake viral marketing campaigns because I don't see the harm in them. If people get fooled into believing they're real, pretty much all they're getting fooled about is that some guy on the internet with good Flash skills likes Product X.

I thought at first that you were talking about actual fake news, which is a whole different story.

Is it currently illegal for companies to air TV ads with demonstrably false claims about people endorsing their products? (Like, a paid actor looking at the camera and saying, "I'm a doctor, and I tell all my patients to take Flintstones vitamins.")

Why should this be regulated?

The same reason that any advertisement is regulated: to ensure that they are honest. We've decided that we don't like snake-oil salesmen pitching cures to cancer door to door. If you can't make fraudulent claims in tv commercials, why should you be able to make them on flogs, or viral videos?

It would basically be a labeling law. You just have to say who you are.

I would argue that something like All Your Snakes or lonelygirl15 or this Sony thing (though I didn't watch it) is not a fraudulent claim. Or rather, the fraudulent claim is that some random person who doesn't really exist likes their product. Not only is it harder to call that a claim, but there's a big ethical difference between that and lying about whether snake oil cures cancer.

If we are going to call for more government regulation of ads, they should start with 21st-century snake oil like weight-loss pills.

That said, I don't like how ads are worming their way into entertainment either.

some random person who doesn't really exist

Considering that the spokesperson's nonexistence is what's being concealed, that's not really a mitigating factor. It may make things worse, actually.

It seems to me like requiring a website's creator to disclose, somewhere on the site, if they have a financial relationship with the product they're pushing, is a pretty mild requirement, and it avoids exhausting the public sphere's capacity to investigate trustworthiness (which will otherwise get drained by wave after wave of corporate shills).

If *you* are the product, as with Lonelygirl15, it seems like a decent law would leave plenty of space for people to make shit up.

can we examine the use of the word "fake" in these instances? they're not "fake" images or videos - they're real! they just happen to be by people who are associated with the products they're referencing. how could someone create a "fake" video about PSPs or Snakes On A Plane? the video doesn't play? it's actually a ham sandwich?