Research On Legal Regulation Of Micro-blog Advertising

Microblog advertising is the combination of microblog, the new web2.0 mass media and traditional advertising. Specifically, microblog advertising refers to the information dissemination behavior promoting commercial products and services with words, pictures, videos, and superlinks on the platform of microblog. It doesn’t differ from traditional advertising in essence, but it has many comparative advantages. Microblog advertising relies on the microblog platform to make fissional spread, it has large coverage, fast spreading speed and large quantity of audiences. Meanwhile, it has high openness and strong interactivity by shifting the point to plane propagation mode to the plane to plane interactive propagating with the following and forwarding mechanism of microblog, which lowers the advertising costs significantly while enhancing the relevance and accuracy of advertisement, and thus gets much preferred by the advertisers.Issues arise in its rapid development, however, especially in the aspect of legal regulation. Currently the advertisements in China are subject to Advertising Law, Advertising Regulations of People’s Republic of China, and some other regulations and local rules. Due to the rigidity and limitations of the law, the current legal system lacks further complementation to regulate microblog advertising effectively. Beside the lag in legislation, the overlapping of advertisement subjects makes it difficult to distribute legal responsibilities, the unclear identities of network service providers, the unfair competitions using new network technologies, hidden advertising behavior, and celebrity endorsements that are not subject to legal supervision, such issues are reflected in traditional advertising and have gotten their legal restriction. But microblog advertising has its technical features relating to internet that requires far more work in regulation with the existing law systems.At present, we are in lack of studies of microblog advertising regulating laws. The legislation and supervision of it are both insufficient. In such condition, we could learn from the foreign experience to consummate our work in this field. First, we need to modify and improve Advertising Law, include microblog advertising into the scope of it, clearly define the advertisement subjects and their legal responsibilities, Give individuals the right to publish microblog advertisements, and include network service providers into the scope of advertisement subjects. At the same time, we need to establish specialized regulatory agencies, cultivate regulators with expertise, and supervise new illegal advertising methods like superlinks, embedded keywords, etc. We also need to further normalize the celebrity endorsement on the platform of microblog, set clear lines for the scope and liabilities of their endorsement with their own microblogs, and build a market access system strengthening on registration. In addition, the importance of industry self-regulation and third-party inspecting organizations should also be valued to build a sound regulatory system of microblog advertising.