Republic of Korea: Closed investigation into deceptive advertisements on online social platforms

On 14 February 2024, the Korea Fair Trade Commission (FTC) concluded its inquiry into deceptive advertisements on major social networking services (SNS) such as Instagram, Naver Blog, and YouTube. The inquiry, which ran from March to December 2023, focused on posts that misled consumers into believing that paid advertisements were unbiased testimonials. The FTC found that the proportion of such posts has been decreasing significantly over the past three years, likely due to industry efforts to comply with the law through monitoring and self-correction of SNS postings. However, the FTC identified a need for improvement in the disclosure of financial interests in these posts. In response, the FTC plans to strengthen its monitoring of sectors where back-end online advertisements often occur, such as apparel, textiles, and household goods, and increase its monitoring of short-form posts.