This right here. It's a fine line. I feel like the parent comment is implying like it's an easily exploited line but that's my personal intuition so I'll defend it in isolation. Put simply, if Michael Jordan, Shaq, or any other signature memeber of the NBA told me how to dunk better, I'd probably listen because their real world reputation has already informed me that they're skilled at the thing they're advertising about. I trust them, not because I admire them but because they are proven craftsmen of the thing they are discussing. They might be discussing it for profit in this instance, but in the real world they have shown themselves to be above average men of skill and for that reason I am interested in their knowledge.
If Thor and the Avengers discover how to beat Thanos because they used a search engine on iOS instead of android I might get pretty hyped because I really like that franchise, but I know at a fundamental level that they're fake people achieving fake success against a fake villain. The same cannot be said about professional athletes, chefs, academics, or others who compete in a competitive BUT ALSO REAL environment.
Things are getting a bit recursive now. This thread was discussing the ethics and legality of the phenomenon of paying influencers to plug products in the first place. The article is about exploiting that phenomenon.
That said, the accounts in the article are fake, yes, but they claim to be real. That's not fiction, it's fraud. If they had set up the accounts to clearly state that they are fictional characters, and still gotten paid to endorse products, then it's a lot more like product placement in movies.
(Hmm, I wonder if you could actually pull something like this off. Most major social media celebrities do appear to be fairly highly engineered personas, the leap to pure fiction doesn't seem to be that big)
If Thor and the Avengers discover how to beat Thanos because they used a search engine on iOS instead of android I might get pretty hyped because I really like that franchise, but I know at a fundamental level that they're fake people achieving fake success against a fake villain. The same cannot be said about professional athletes, chefs, academics, or others who compete in a competitive BUT ALSO REAL environment.