You’re scrolling at night and a video stops you. Good lighting, calm voice, someone holding up a bottle and saying this is the thing that finally fixed their energy, their gut, their sleep. Somewhere in the caption, maybe, sits the word “partner.”
Most people never ask the question that matters: what does federal law require that person to tell you, and what does it let them leave out?
The answer is more specific than you’d guess. The Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides, revised in 2023 and codified at 16 CFR Part 255, decide when a paid relationship has to be revealed, where the disclosure has to sit, and, most important for health content, what an endorsement is never allowed to say no matter how carefully it’s labeled.
How often does disclosure happen? A 2025 study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research coded 8,871 videos from 97 of the most-followed U.S. creators on TikTok. Among the 648 videos featuring a branded food or beverage, 449 carried no disclosure of a brand relationship at all. That’s 69.3 percent. The single most common disclosure method among the rest was tagging the brand in the caption, which the FTC does not count as a disclosure.
The rule almost nobody knows, and the one that matters most for health
Start here, because everything else is secondary: an endorsement cannot be used to make a claim the seller could not legally make itself.
A supplement company cannot say on its label that a product treats, prevents or cures a disease. A claim like that turns the product into an unapproved drug in FDA’s eyes. (The full structure-function versus disease-claim line is its own subject, covered separately in this library.) What the Endorsement Guides add is that the company cannot buy its way around that limit by hiring a mouth.
The regulation at 16 CFR 255.1 says an endorsement may not carry any express or implied representation that would be deceptive if the advertiser made it directly. The FTC’s Health Products Compliance Guidance, published December 20, 2022, puts the same idea in plainer terms: advertisers should not use testimonials or expert endorsements to make claims that “would be deceptive or couldn’t be substantiated if the advertiser made them directly.”
So a disease claim is not laundered by putting it in someone else’s mouth. If a bottle cannot say “lowers blood pressure,” a paid creator cannot say it for the bottle.
That same December 2022 guidance sets the evidence bar behind the rule. Health benefit claims generally need competent and reliable scientific evidence, and for health benefits specifically, the FTC says substantiation will generally need to come from randomized, controlled human clinical testing. It also makes a point that undercuts the entire testimonial format: it isn’t enough that a testimonial reflects the honest opinion of the person giving it. The advertiser still needs scientific support for the implied promise that the product will work the same way for you.
What counts as a connection you have a right to know about
The standard lives at 16 CFR 255.5. A connection between the endorser and the seller that might materially affect how much weight or credibility you give the endorsement, and that you would not reasonably expect, has to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously. The Guides frame “not expected” around whether a significant minority of the audience would be surprised by it.
Payment is the obvious case. The less obvious ones are where readers get caught:
- Free product. A sample counts. An unsolicited box counts. According to the FTC, if a brand sends you free or discounted products, you need to disclose when you mention any of that brand’s products, not just the one that arrived.
- Discounts, reimbursement, free travel, free meals. Anything of value.
- Non-cash incentives. The FTC says even a chance to appear in the brand’s advertising can require disclosure.
- Employment. An employee praising the employer’s product has to say so, and listing the employer on a profile page is not enough.
- Family and friendship. Relatives and friends who got a free meal or service and then raved about it are supposed to say how they’re connected.
There’s no dollar threshold. The FTC notes that very small items may not require disclosure but says it’s safer to disclose anyway.
One thing flipped the other way, because people get this backward: you don’t owe anyone a statement that you have no relationship with a brand. If you bought it with your own money and you like it, you can just say so.
What a disclosure has to look like, and what doesn’t count
The 2023 revision added a definition of “clear and conspicuous” to 16 CFR 255.0. A disclosure is clear and conspicuous when it is “difficult to miss (i.e., easily noticeable) and easily understandable by ordinary consumers.” For social media and other interactive media, the regulation says the disclosure should be unavoidable.
The FTC’s “Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers” page turns that into practice. Wording that works is blunt. The FTC’s own examples include the word Ad, the tag #ad at the very start of a post, the phrase Sponsored by plus a brand name, a sentence saying the brand paid the person to talk about it, and a thank-you naming the brand for sending free product. When free product was the only benefit, the word Gifted plus the brand name is enough.
Wording that doesn’t work is where the real enforcement risk lives. The FTC lists as inadequate:
- Tagging the brand. A tag is an endorsement, not a disclosure of why you’re endorsing.
- Saying “thank you,” which doesn’t tell anyone that something was received.
- Vague shorthand: “sp,” “spon,” “collab,” “#partner,” “#ambassador,” “#advisor,” “#comped,” “#hosted,” “#freeproduct.”
- Hashtags run together, like a brand name jammed into a word.
- A disclosure that sits only in a comment, only in a video’s description when the endorsement happens inside the video, only on an “About Me” page, or only at the end of a long post.
- Anything a reader has to tap “more” to see.
Platform labels get their own warning. A built-in “paid partnership” tool can be used in addition to your own disclosure, but the FTC says not to assume it’s sufficient on its own. The creator and the brand stay responsible.
For video, disclose inside the video, not just in the upload description, and do it both out loud and on screen when the endorsement itself is both spoken and shown. For live streams, repeat it, because people arrive partway through.
Why the exact word matters more than you’d think
Two words that look interchangeable are not. In a 2021 study in Addictive Behaviors, researchers used eye-tracking with 200 participants ages 16 to 24 viewing their own Instagram feeds with influencer posts inserted. Posts labeled #ad had nearly twice the odds of being recognized as commercial compared with posts labeled #sponsored, an odds ratio of 1.98. Every additional second of attention on the hashtag raised the odds of recognition by about 22 percent.
That’s the practical case for the FTC’s insistence on plain words in obvious places. “Sponsored” sounds softer and reads as less commercial, even to people who are looking right at it.
The results in the video are not the results you should expect
The second big rule is about typical outcomes. If an endorser reports an exceptional result and the advertiser lacks proof that it represents what people generally achieve, the ad has to clearly disclose the generally expected results. The FTC’s own illustration is someone losing 20 pounds in two months.
A detail that trips up advertisers: a “results not typical” disclaimer does not cure the problem. The FTC’s position is that an endorsement describing a specific result is read as typical, and a disclaimer doesn’t change what the audience takes away. Either the advertiser has evidence the result is typical, or the ad states what people generally get.
Applied to a feed, this means the before-and-after post is doing something the law already anticipated. One person’s six-week transformation is not data. Why individual outcomes mislead in health specifically, including conditions that improve on their own, is covered in this library’s article on reviews and testimonials.
Two different federal instruments, constantly confused
In October 2024 a new FTC rule took effect, and it gets blamed and credited for things it does not do.
Then there’s the rule people most often confuse with this one. Since October 21, 2024, the FTC has enforced 16 CFR Part 465, its Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials. Asked directly whether it governs when and how influencers must disclose brand relationships, the FTC’s answer is no. The rule’s only disclosure requirements involve certain company-insider situations. Influencer disclosure remains the territory of the FTC Act and the Endorsement Guides.
What Part 465 does do to influencers is narrow and sharp. Under 465.2(a), someone in the business of writing, creating or selling testimonials can be liable for materially misrepresenting that they used a product, or misrepresenting what their experience with it was. Lying about use is the new rule’s business. Staying quiet about payment is the old one’s.
Two more boundaries worth holding onto. Ordinary people cannot be held liable under Part 465 for what they say or leave out in a review. And nobody gets a private right of action out of it, which means a lawsuit of your own isn’t available.
What happens to people who ignore this
The Endorsement Guides don’t carry the force of law on their own. They describe how the FTC applies Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bans deceptive and unfair practices. The FTC is explicit that its guidance cannot be definitive and offers no safe harbor from liability.
But there’s a mechanism that converts guidance into money, and it’s worth understanding because it explains why brands suddenly started policing their creators.
On October 13, 2021, the FTC sent a Notice of Penalty Offenses to more than 700 companies. The notice lists endorsement practices the agency has already found unlawful in litigated administrative cases: falsely claiming a third party endorsed a product, misstating whether an endorser is a current or actual user, using an endorsement to prop up a deceptive performance claim, failing to disclose an unexpected material connection, and implying one person’s experience is typical. Once a company has received that notice, doing those things anyway exposes it to civil penalties, which the FTC’s announcement put at up to $43,792 per violation.
Enforcement reaches health products directly. In March 2020 the FTC sued a tea company and its owners in federal court in Florida. The agency alleged the company claimed its teas would fight cancer, clear clogged arteries, reduce migraines, and treat and prevent colds and flu, without reliable scientific evidence behind any of it. The FTC also alleged that the well-known social media personalities the company paid did not adequately disclose that they were paid. A stipulated order for a permanent injunction and monetary judgment was entered March 17, 2020. In February 2022 the agency announced it was returning more than $930,000 to buyers, and it sent warning letters to individual influencers about disclosing paid endorsements prominently.
Six questions to run on any post recommending a health product
This is a reading procedure, not a legal test.
- Can you see a disclosure before you tap anything? Look for “ad,” “sponsored” or “paid” above the fold, in the caption’s first line, or spoken in the first few seconds.
- Could that claim legally appear on the package? If the post names a disease, a diagnosis or a drug-like effect, something is wrong regardless of who’s saying it.
- Does the post say what usually happens, or only what happened to this person? No general expectation stated is a flag.
- Is this an experience or a benefits list? People describing real use mention timing, cost, taste, inconvenience. Scripts list benefits.
- Does anything in this post cut against the sale? A creator who never names a downside, never says who shouldn’t take something, and never reports a product that didn’t work is running a sales page.
- Who gets paid if you click? A tracked link changes the economics of a recommendation in ways disclosure alone doesn’t fix. That’s the subject of this library’s article on affiliate marketing.
When a post is not the right place to be getting answers
A feed is a bad place to triage a symptom. Some situations call for a clinician, not a product.
Get medical care rather than a supplement if you have chest pressure or shortness of breath, blood in your stool or urine, a new lump, unexplained weight loss, a headache that’s the worst you’ve ever had, or symptoms that have gone on for more than a few weeks without improving. Those are evaluation problems, not purchase problems.
Tell a clinician or pharmacist before you add anything if you take prescription medicines or have surgery scheduled. Three documented risks sit behind that advice, all from the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements. Warfarin, the blood thinner, does less of its job when vitamin K is added. Many medicines get broken down faster once St. John’s wort is in the picture. And a handful of products either thin the blood or change how anesthesia hits you. A creator who doesn’t know your medication list cannot warn you about any of that.
What disclosure does and doesn’t tell you
Below, we look at the most useful way to hold all of this.
A disclosure tells you a relationship exists. It does not tell you the claim is false, and it does not tell you the person is lying. Plenty of paid posts describe products accurately.
The absence of a disclosure tells you less than people assume. It might mean nobody was paid. It might mean somebody was paid and didn’t say so. Mostly it tells you something about how carefully the source handles its obligations, which is itself information about how carefully it probably handles evidence.
Don’t assume a label makes you immune, either. In a 2026 experiment published in Digital Health, 289 participants watched long-form “what I eat in a day” videos that either did or did not include sponsorship. Sponsorship raised how trustworthy the creator seemed, while lowering how authentic the creator seemed. Seeing the label did not make viewers discount what they saw.
There is broad public appetite for the rules themselves. A nationally representative survey of U.S. adults conducted in September 2024, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found 82.9 percent of Democrats and 80.5 percent of Republicans supported requiring influencer disclosures, one of the few things both groups agreed on.
The single most useful move is the one in question two above. Before you weigh who’s paying whom, ask whether the claim in front of you could legally appear on the product’s own label. If the answer is no, no amount of sincerity, disclosure or production value makes it true.
Sources
- Federal Trade Commission. “Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers.” ftc.gov
- Federal Trade Commission. “The FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking.” ftc.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. “16 CFR Part 255, Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” ecfr.gov
- Federal Trade Commission. “Health Products Compliance Guidance.” ftc.gov
- Federal Trade Commission. “The Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule: Questions and Answers.” ftc.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. “16 CFR Part 465, Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials.” ecfr.gov
- Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews and Other Misleading Endorsements.” ftc.gov
- Federal Trade Commission. “Teami, LLC (Matter No. 182-3174).” ftc.gov
- NIH Office of Dietary Supplements. “Dietary Supplements: What You Need to Know.” ods.od.nih.gov
- PubMed. “Dupuis et al. "How TikTok Influencers Disclose Food and Beverage Brand Partnerships: Descriptive Study." Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2025. DOI: 10.2196/60891.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Klein et al. "Testing potential disclosures for e-cigarette sponsorship on social media." Addictive Behaviors, 2021. DOI: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2021.107146.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Pfender et al. "Your media diet is impacting your actual diet: The effects of influencer 'What I Eat in a Day' YouTube videos on influencer perceptions and nutrition behaviors." Digital Health, 2026. DOI: 10.1177/20552076261416379.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Cornacchione Ross et al. "Public Support for Warning Label Policies on Social Media Among U.S. Adults in 2024." American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2025.108067.” doi.org