So, I wonder at times, just where does the responsibility rest?

If you promote sites where the model is 18 or older, and you find that a sponsor is suddenly informed a model they used claims to be underage, whose responsibility is it?

To begin with, let’s take a look at the circumstances.

You get told by a 3rd party that a model you are promoting on your site is not of legal age, a year younger actually. The Sponsor hasn’t notified you but the person telling you is direct competition to that sponsor.

So what do you do?

For myself, I put the post or page into ‘private‘ so that it isn’t able to be viewed, then I contact the sponsor. Now the question is, do you delete immediately or do you wait for a reply? And should the sponsor have already contacted you?

That is the dilema.

When a sponsor has clear evidence to the model’s faked age, then I would say YES they should have already contacted you, but what if there is doubt, question, about that illegality? Should they be rushing to alarm affiliates that a possible promotional model is not of age, or do they wait for proper proof?

The Internet is a great place, lots of information out there. Unfortunately, a lot of that information is just speculation, idle gossip, and inaccurate. So what does an affiliate do? Panic or do a simple removal or move to making the potential illegal content private? Then too, there is the whole Cache issue that occurs for a site crawled by the Search Engines. That ‘now private’ post is still showing in the cache.  Will even if you DELETE IT.

Then too, there is the whole legal issue. What if the cache is used to lay a claim that you are promoting underage? I mean if an item is posted say 6 weeks before the facts are determined, what are the legal ramifications? Again, is it the Sponsor at fault, or the Affiliate?

Posted on July 25th, 2008 by No Bull
Filed under: Marketing 101