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Comment by fasthands9 | Hacker News Reader

I would prefer if the FTC banned celebrities from endorsing financial products instead of an ad hoc system of suing people after a scandal (of various size).

Otherwise - I'm not sure how this would really ever work. Will commercial directors and producers also be found liable? What if you endorse something like a normal Visa credit card and then three years later there is a scandal at Visa? What if FTX just lost 3% of customer funds? What due diligence could Giselle really have done? FTX was invested in by respected VC and SBF was featured positively in Forbes and the traditional media.

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I'm pretty sure banning endorsements would violate the first amendment. It has to be something very serious to justify prior restraint. Making the consequences of a bad endorsement large on the other hand does not have such issues.

I'm pretty sure it would not violate the first amendment. The FTC already limits what drug advertisers can say and what financial advertisers can say. Some products like cigarettes can't even be advertised. Until fairly recently hedge funds were not allowed to advertise. I'm not sure why the FTC or SEC couldn't put the same rules in place (if it wanted) for trading platforms.

https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2013/12/sec-lifts-longt...

The FTC has no statutory authority to issue such a ban. There is no legal definition of "celebrity". It's such a vague term as to be meaningless in a legal sense.

You may be right that they wouldnt want the eventual complexity but I don't think it would be impossible to say that if someone in an ad uses their existing name and likeness then it is different than just a random model smiling in the ad. The FTX ad with Brady relied heavily on his actual likeness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFZqk8k4QwQ

"Celebrity" is ill defined, but the law definitely recognizes a public figure

The practical way this would work is probably insurance - if you want to pay a celebrity to endorse a product, then you also buy an insurance policy which will pay their costs if they’re sued due to that endorsement. That makes it similar to other professional liability insurance.

Why stop at financial products? If a celebrity advertises a car as safe and then someone close to you dies in a crash, should you not hold that celebrity accountable? Why didn't they look into all claims about safety of those cars?

I was proposing you ban endorsements of financial products so that it would not be possible to sue someone for later wrongdoings by that company. Once you have explicit rules for what is legal and what is not (there are already these rules) then it eliminates any confusion of whats illegal if you are a public figure.

Commercial directors and producers should also be held liable. We have a marketing industry which is far too ambivalent about the negative impacts they scale.

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