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Asus UK PR believes it is ‘legal to buy positive reviews’

kitguru.net

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Re: Asus UK PR believes it is ‘legal to buy positive reviews’

#4

Post by bgidley »

necovek wrote: post #2

But it is legal. The obligation is on the reviewer to highlight they've been paid for a review, otherwise they are illegally misleading their readers. Whether that's moral is another thing.

It may not be legal depending on how it’s done - this was Asus UK and the rules are on https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-reviews-an...

The UK Government are also in processing tightening this up…

Re: Asus UK PR believes it is ‘legal to buy positive reviews’

#7

Post by orra »

necovek wrote: post #2

But it is legal. The obligation is on the reviewer to highlight they've been paid for a review, otherwise they are illegally misleading their readers. Whether that's moral is another thing.

You're right that paid reviews may be legal if they're clearly advertised as adverts, as opposed to framed as impartial reviews. But walking that line is fine, right, because people expect reviews to be impartial.

Regardless, the legal obligation[1] to transparently advertise this is on the firm, not (just) the bought reviewer. IIRC the Advertising Standards Authority recently had a case on a social media paid promotion, which reinforced this. Regardless, IMO the statute is quite clear the obligation is on the firm.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/part/2/made

Re: Asus UK PR believes it is ‘legal to buy positive reviews’

#8

Post by MrGilbert »

Asus is currently in a bad spot, as they released a BIOS update as Beta, which should address an issue where their boards would cause a CPU to explode.

They did, however, leave the usual "this is beta, install on your own risk, this will void your warranty" disclaimer on, which currently backfires, as it seems as if Asus does not want to take responsibility. It is unknown if the statement was intentional , or just the usual disclaimer.

Of course, that PR statement doesn’t help.

Source: https://youtu.be/cbGfc-JBxlY

(There are more sources to it)

//Edit:

Another well-known channel stated that they used Asus for a long time, and noticed a decline in quality of the samples provided (as far as receiving boards that have been RMA'ed before), and also noticed that the RMA experience for average Jane and Joe has become worse. Asus also failed to negotiate further sponsoring the channel by simply not getting back to requests. As such, the channel completely canceled all business relations to Asus.

Source: https://youtu.be/wZ-QVOKGVyM

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