False Advertising: The Disease Under The Microscope Report

At present, our life is filled with various false advertisements. Different false advertisement can be seen in many fields, especially in medicine, health care, cosmetic, farming equipment, hairdressing and face lifting. The tricks are increasing and the harm to our society is also greater and greater. The hazard of false advertisement to the people and the society can no longer be overlooked.The rampancy of false advertisement not only causes costumer's lost in money, but also results in the distrust to the advertisement, media and government. The advertisers and media, as the principal part of advertisement market, have not fulfilled their task of advertisement supervision and management. What's more, there are even someone allured by money have discarded their professional etiquette without regard of the people and the society.For the moment, there are many clauses in our Advertisement Law, Anti-Unfair Competition Law, Law on Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests for the governing and penalizing of false advertisement to protect costumer's rights and interests. Our government is also using more efforts on the executing of various solutions to sweep the disordered situation in advertisement field. However, due to some omission in the present laws and regulations, some advertisement jobholderswho are familiar with the laws, regulations and policies can still make use of such omission to gainimproper interests. Besides, there are also some government officers who can not fulfill their duty fully and strictly. These are the base of the rampancy of false advertisement.On the other side, because the people have not sufficient ability in the identifying of commodity quality, their awareness to protect themselves is very weak when the right and interests are violated. This provides the base and conditions to the repeated occurrences of false advertisement. It is an emergency task to prohibit false advertisement, clarify the work style and put the system in order of the advertisement industry. This paper, on the base of the social background analyzed as above, has made complete analyses and summaries on the origination, patterns and the social hazard of false advertisement. Material cases are used to explain the abnormal utilization of promulgation theories in the false advertisement. Some good experience and solutions to false advertisement from the countries with advanced advertisement industry are also introduced for reference. It is the target of this paper to get some inspiration from such cases, so as to bring forward some practical suggestion in accordance with the present laws and regulations as well as in consideration of the weak links of our advertisement industry.