Social media has never been as strong as right now, with the booming of technology, from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to TikTok, Youtube, WhatsApp, etc. Nearly every single person in the world exposed to the Internet used at least some kind of social media. Social media has brought people around the world together, contributing to a harmonious connecting world. However, it has also left the door open for illegal activities, such as counterfeiting to roam with little to no oversight.
Celebrities play an important role in the facilitation of the spread of counterfeiting goods on social media sites.
Every celebrity has tons of followers. That’s basically the one and only condition of being a celebrity – to have many followers and become an influencer in society.
However, not all celebrities use that kind of popularity to help society and become the role model that they are. Many ‘barely qualifies’ celebrities will gladly trade their reputation for some money from shady organizations to sell fake/counterfeiting products with low quality.
According to a study from the IPO of the United Kingdom, celebrities or social media influencers all have massive sway over the purchasing decision of their fans or followers (the report focuses primarily on female consumers).
Even if the influencers don’t actively encourage the buying of fake goods, they could still have contributed to that outcome.
The report has stated that just unintentionally, social media influencers could be contributing to tens of billions in counterfeit sales.
Sponsorship of social media influencers
As we have already known, social media influencers normally don’t work from paycheck to paycheck like regular people. Instead, they got most of their money from advertisement and sponsorship with their image or their brand.
According to figures published by The Economist, YouTubers with more than 7 million followers can expect to earn $300,000 per post with product promotion. YouTubers with relatively low followers of 100,000 individuals can still anticipate receiving $12,500 a post.
Youtube is the platform to make money. Other social media sites have a somewhat lower ‘paycheck’ to influencers but it is still phenomenal.
On Facebook, influencers with 7 million followers can receive $187,500 for commercial endorsements, while Snapchat and Instagram are level-pegging at $150,000 each.
Twitter is one of the weaker sites for celebrities to earn money. Stars in the 7m-follower frame can net only $60,000 a post which is still not bad considering that their post took only about 10 seconds to publicize.
This is just the overall general amount of money earned by influencers.
Some extremely big celebrities like Kylee Jenner earned about $1.2 million for every sponsor. For the entire brand, David Beckham currently held the position of the highest-paid celebrity of all time to have endorsed a company name – Adidas with $160 million USD.
Influence from social media influencers to the people
The people trust their influencers, even if that trust is not checked by competent authorities.
This means that regardless of the authenticity of the products, the followers will still blindly purchase them because the celebrity promotes the products publicly and vouched for them with their name.
Out of all the buyers of counterfeiting goods influenced by celebrities, 3% of them have no recollection that the goods they buy are fake. This indicates that these buyers have full trust in their influencers and don’t feel the need to double-check whether the promotional products are real or at least safe or not.
Subpar products not only hurt the wallets but they might even hurt the health of the buyers as the promotion of health items by influencers is also rising recently. Many reputable celebrities have been exposed for promoting items that have a direct bad effect on the consumers.
According to the report by the UKIPO, 10% of the purchasers of counterfeit products do it because they were encouraged, and motivated by the social media influencers.
Although the number might not be impressive, keep in mind that for the global counterfeiting market, the money must be counted by $ billion.
As the current counterfeiting market in the world has a value of $509 billion, 10% of those trade is worth about $51 billion. Therefore, just from social media, there has been 51$ billion of counterfeiting trade being conducted worldwide.
This number will only grow exponentially in the future as social media platforms will keep developing and the celebrities and influencers will just become more famous as the number of people exposed to the Internet will keep expanding as time passed.
The cause and solution to the problem
Although the Internet has only been around for decades, counterfeiting is not new. It has been around probably since the creation of humanity and civilization.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the shady organizations that deal in counterfeiting adapt so quickly to social media and use it to create impacts on consumers.
Nearly every country has the same problem in regards to influencers and counterfeits. They have all had a headache on how to deal with the problem but the fact that the skyrocketing increase in these activities left their hands tied to the solution.
Regulators and lawmakers have tried to create some kind of laws and restriction methods on influencers. In Vietnam, the Government has published the Code of conduct for people working in the field of art – a somewhat restricted method for people with an impact on the Internet and the lives of people.
As a solution to this matter, the court might be the best way for brand owners to deal with counterfeiting and the contribution of influencers.
Although the lawsuit against every single one of the celebrities is fantastic, it is unrealistic and often doesn’t lead to a happy ending as the means needed to prove the impacts of influencers in a case is extremely hard, as they don’t normally directly involve in the selling and buying of counterfeit goods.
However, brand owners, using their rights on trademark could still sue one target and have a claim of contributory infringement against other social media influencers that have an impact on the case.
Nonetheless, this is still hard to be applied in reality, demonstrated clearly by there is little to no data in regards to lawsuits of that nature. A single Amazon case against two influencers is almost all the normal people can find on the Internet.
To deal with the matter of influencers intentionally or unintentionally violating the law and the rights of brand owners, lawmakers in each country need to come up with stricter policies to supervise the actions of celebrities and influencers on social media platforms and have harsher punishment for those cases.
You can see a list of International IP Firms here.