The FTC's 2023 guides add a definition for virtual influencers

The persona

This entry concerns a regulator's guidance document rather than a persona: the Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides, the agency's standing interpretation of what counts as a deceptive endorsement under the FTC Act. The guides do not name individual companies or characters; they set the framework other entries on this site apply when describing how a specific operator disclosed, or failed to disclose, a persona's paid status.

What the documents establish

The FTC's own press release, dated 29 June 2023, announces the first revision of the guides since 2009, following a May 2022 public-comment period. It lists six changes, including a new principle on manipulating reviews and a definition of 'clear and conspicuous,' and, specifically, 'changing the definition of "endorsements" to clarify the extent to which it includes fake reviews, virtual influencers, and tags in social media.' The codified text at 16 CFR Part 255, sourced to the Federal Register of 26 July 2023, defines 'clear and conspicuous' as a disclosure that is 'difficult to miss... and easily understandable by ordinary consumers,' required in whichever medium, visual, audible, or both, carries the claim needing disclosure. A companion FAQ document, 'What People Are Asking,' retrieved 16 September 2026, confirms the guides were 'revised in 2023 with new or revised principles, examples, and definitions, including a new definition of "clearly and conspicuously."'

Character versus company

There is no persona to separate from an operator in this entry, but the same discipline applies in reverse: the guides are agency guidance, not a statute or a court's binding rule, a distinction the press release itself preserves by describing them as guidance meant 'to ensure that advertising using reviews or endorsements is truthful,' rather than as enforceable law in themselves. The FAQ document underlines this, noting the guidance 'doesn't provide a safe harbor from potential liability' and that any specific case still depends on its own facts. Treating the guides as if they carried the force of a court ruling overstates what the FTC's own materials claim for them.

What to watch

The explicit inclusion of 'virtual influencers' in the revised endorsement definition is new language as of 2023 and has not, in the documents reviewed here, been tested against a specific enforcement action naming a virtual persona. A reader tracking this site's other entries about disclosure should watch for the first FTC action that cites this specific 2023 language against an operator of a CGI or AI-driven persona, which would show how the definition applies in practice rather than in guidance text alone.

• Has the FTC brought an enforcement action citing the 2023 guides' virtual-influencer language specifically?
• How does 'clear and conspicuous' interact with a platform's own built-in disclosure tool, which the FTC's materials say may not always be adequate?
• What distinguishes agency guidance, as described here, from a rule that carries independent legal force?

The dated fact worth carrying forward is narrow but concrete: as of 26 July 2023, the FTC's own codified guidance explicitly contemplates virtual influencers within its definition of an endorsement, a textual anchor for every other entry on this site that discusses a persona's disclosure practices.