This Is Disclosure
Cheat sheet · Influencers and creators

Cheat sheet for influencers and creators.

Attention is your currency, and this site is pointing at the acts nobody applauds. Spend a little of it where no one is counting.

Not every hardship is a test, and nothing here is graded.

A woodcut of a young creator in a quiet street, carrying a stranger's heavy bag up a flight of steps, while through a window behind them a ring light and phone sit alone on an empty table.
  1. Say plainly when something is paid, and what you got.
    Free product, a fee, a discount code, a trip: if a brand gave you something, say so where people will see it, in simple words, not buried in a pile of hashtags.
    Say"This is an ad. The company paid me, and I'll tell you what I honestly think."
  2. Do one good thing with no camera and no post, ever.
    Carry the bag, cover the tab, sit with the neighbor. Don't film it, don't mention it later, and don't save it for a good story. Let it be something your audience never learns.
  3. Don't feed the pile-on, and don't make content of a stranger's worst moment.
    If a crowd is turning on someone, you don't have to add a take, a reaction video or a screenshot. Scroll past. Say, if your followers ask: "I'm going to sit this one out."
  4. Don't profit from someone's pain without their say.
    If a post is about a real person's grief, illness or crisis, ask first, let them say no, and share the benefit fairly.
    Say"Would you be okay with me sharing this? You can say no, and I won't be upset."
  5. Credit the people whose work or idea you used.
    Name the photographer, the writer, the small creator whose joke or format you borrowed, and link to them.
    Say"This came from @maya. Go give her your attention."
  6. Be honest about the edits, and when a follower is struggling, respond with care.
    Say when a photo is filtered or staged, and now and then show the ordinary day. If someone writes that they are in a dark place, reply as a person, not a diagnosis, and point to real help: call or text 988 in the US, or findahelpline.com elsewhere.
    Say"I'm glad you told me. Please reach out to a crisis line, or someone you trust today."
  7. Treat your audience's trust as a responsibility.
    Correct your mistakes publicly and plainly, keep in mind that some of your viewers are kids, and take a break when you need one.
    Say"I got that wrong. Here's the right version, and I'm sorry."

The evidence behind this sheet

The FTC says creators must clearly disclose material connections to brands, and research on social media suggests that outrage spreads well, which gives a creator a quiet incentive to feed it. The evidence on whether social media harms wellbeing is mixed, and none of it shows that any one kind act changes an audience.

Disclosures 101 for Social Media InfluencersThe FTC says influencers must disclose financial or other connections to a brand, including free products, in clear language placed with the endorsement itself, and that platform disclosure tools may not be enough on their own.official · Federal Trade Commission (2019)Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networksIn 563,312 tweets on gun control, same-sex marriage and climate change, each moral-emotional word raised a tweet's retweet rate by about 20% on average.study · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via PubMed Central; Brady and colleagues, 2017)Out-group animosity drives engagement on social mediaIn 2,730,215 Facebook and Twitter posts, each word about the political out-group raised the odds of a share or retweet by about 67%, and the authors note the findings are correlational.study · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via PubMed Central; Rathje, Van Bavel, and van der Linden, 2021)The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology useAcross three datasets with 355,358 respondents, digital technology use was linked to adolescent well-being negatively but weakly, accounting for at most 0.4% of the variation, so the picture is more mixed than headlines suggest.skeptical · Nature Human Behaviour (Orben and Przybylski, 2019, via Oxford University Research Archive)Media recommendations for responsible coverage of suicideThe page advises considering the risk of contagion, reporting truthfully, and showing that suicide can be prevented, and it directs people in crisis to call or text 988.official · SAVE (Suicide Awareness Voices of Education), a nonprofit that hosts the ReportingOnSuicide.org recommendations
Where the evidence is thin. The outrage studies are observational and come mostly from Twitter and Facebook posts about politics, so they do not show that a creator who stays out of a pile-on loses or gains anything, and they may not apply to other platforms. The wellbeing evidence is mixed, with small average associations that can hide larger effects for some people. The FTC page is guidance, not legal advice, and rules differ by country. The safe messaging page is written for news media, so applying it to creators is a reasonable adaptation, not a tested one. These sheets do not claim that any single action will grow, shrink or protect an audience.
If you only do one thing this week
Disclose one sponsorship plainly, credit one person by name, and do one good thing that never goes online.

You are allowed to log off and rest. Nobody is owed your constant presence, and a break is not a failure. Nothing here is legal advice: disclosure rules differ by country, and in the US you can read the FTC endorsement guidance. Kindness that is only content is still kind, but it is not the thing this site is pointing at. That is the part no one sees.

This is practical, not religious. I think what you show with your choices is what counts. Share it freely.

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