69 Despite apocryphal stories of gladiators endorsing olive oil in ancient Rome, the earliest documented example comes from Josiah Wedgwood in the 1760s. He aligned his tea sets with British royalty by calling himself “Potter to her Majesty” and from there built his brand. In the late nineteenth century, endorsements from both prominent and everyday people appeared alongside ads for patent medicines, or what we would today call “snake oil.” Many of these testimonials had been paid for, while others were wholly faked. The disrepute of patent medicines cast endorsements in a negative light until they reemerged in the years following World War I, amid a massive rise in media consumption and the advertising industry. For more work on this topic, see Kerry Segrave, Endorsements in Advertising: A Social History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2005), or Peter Suciu, “History of Influencer Marketing Predates Social Media by Centuries—but Is There Enough Transparency in the 21st Century?,” Forbes, December 7, 2020.
70 “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising Federal Acquisition Regulation; Final Rule,” Federal Trade Commission, October 15, 2009, https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/federal_register_notices/guides-concerning-use-endorsements-and-testimonials-advertising-16-cfr-part-255/091015guidesconcerningtestimonials.pdf.
71 Jessica Camille Aguirre, “When Does Mom’s Blog Become an Ad?,” NPR, August 17, 2012, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/08/16/158938607/when-does-moms-blog-become-an-ad. To be clear, the FTC did mandate that celebrities had to disclose engagements if they were “outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.” “FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials,” Federal Trade Commission, June 22, 2017, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2009/10/ftc-publishes-final-guides-governing-endorsements-testimonials.
72 Marisa Taylor, “FTC Not Sure How to Enforce Blogger Disclosure Rules,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2010, https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-10282.
73 Louise Matsakis, “YouTube and Pinterest Influencers Almost Never Disclose Marketing Relationships,” Wired, March 27, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-pinterest-influencers-never-disclose-affiliate-links.
74 “FTC Releases Advertising Disclosures Guidance for Online Influencers,” Federal Trade Commission, November 5, 2019, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/11/ftc-releases-advertising-disclosures-guidance-online-influencers.
75 The FTC has filed and won a handful of high-profile lawsuits in recent years, such as FTC vs. Teami, LLC, a “detoxifying” tea and skincare company that made deceptive health claims and promoted its products with undisclosed celebrity endorsements on social media. In general, however, the FTC has trouble enforcing its guidelines because they are nonbonding instructions rather than formal rules and therefore are more open to interpretation. For recent work on this topic, see Keith Coop, “Influencers: Not So Fluent in Disclosure Compliance,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review 41, no. 1 (2021).
76 Giovanni De Gregorio and Catalina Goanta, “The Influencer Republic: Monetizing Political Speech on Social Media,” German Law Journal 23, no. 2 (March 23, 2022): 204–225, https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2022.15.
77 Renée DiResta, “How the Creator Economy Is Incentivizing Propaganda,” NOEMA, June 7, 2023, https://www.noemamag.com/the-new-media-goliaths.
78 Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923; reis., New York: Ig Publishing, 2011), 92.
79 Jemima Kelly, “Substack’s Success Shows Readers Have Had Enough of Polarised Media,” Financial Times, March 31, 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/3e565df2-0cb2-4126-a879-eb2710 eef03a.
80 Glenn Greenwald, “Glenn Greenwald,” Rumble, n.d., https://rumble.com/GGreenwald. Audience count as of December 3, 2023.
81 Clio Chang, “The Substackerati,” Columbia Journalism Review, November 16, 2020, https://www.cjr.org/special_report/substackerati.php.
CHAPTER 4: THE CROWD
1 George F. Young et al., “Starling Flock Networks Manage Uncertainty in Consensus at Low Cost,” PLoS Computational Biology 9, no. 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002894.
2 Renée DiResta, “How Online Mobs Act like Flocks of Birds,” NOEMA, November 3, 2022, https://www.noemamag.com/how-online-mobs-act-like-flocks-of-birds.
