Broadcasters bid ‘adieu’ to Facebook and Twitter in France

French regulator Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA) recently ruled that TV and radio broadcasters in France are no longer allowed to refer to Facebook or Twitter, unless it’s in relation to a specific news story. That means no more ‘follow us on Twitter’ at the end of TV debates, no ‘post your pictures to Facebook’ as part of an interactive children’s programme, and certainly no ‘tweet us your comments’ during a live broadcast.

The reason behind this apparently draconian legislation is that it’s tantamount to commercial promotion and product placement. According to the CSA, there are ‘many other social networks struggling for recognition… who will complain to us, saying “why not us?”’.

Commercial proposition or common property?

While it’s difficult to pinpoint who these ‘others’ might be (Facebook and Twitter are by far the dominant networks in Europe – there are currently no comparable localised operations such as Douban in China, or Orkut in Brazil and India, for example), the ruling does raise an interesting question. When does a ubiquitous commodity or service cross over from commercial proposition to common property?

Google is a great example of this - it has now taken its place in the OED and is part of our daily vocabulary. The verb ‘to Google’ is clearly and widely understood to mean ‘look something up on the internet’, even if you’re using Bing to get your answers. As brand awareness goes, it’s nothing short of phenomenal.

Yet broadcasters and programme makers are still wary of referring to Google by name – for current affairs, they use the all-encompassing term ‘search engine’. For fictional stories, they use stand-in brands - in the US it’s Finder-Spyder, which appears on a number of TV shows including Heroes, Dexter and CSI. In the UK it’s Search-Wise.net, among one or two others, which was used to great effect in Dr Who and EastEnders.  Broadcasters don’t want the hassle of getting clearance, don’t want to be accused of preferential treatment, don’t want to face potential lawsuits for negative product positioning. But, stand-in brands or veiled references, we all know who they’re talking about.  It’s only a matter of time before Google takes its place alongside Hoover, Aspirin and Sellotape in the lexicon of brands which are so embedded in our consciousness that they become synonymous with the item itself, no matter who created it.

The ‘virtuous circle’ of promotion

Where Facebook and Twitter differ – at least outside France – is that they have effectively circumvented this time-consuming  ‘embedding’ process via a virtuous (some may say vicious) circle involving wide and free promotion on broadcast media, which leads to a gratifying increase in audience activity, which leads to further promotion on broadcast media, and so on.

So, does the CSA have a point? The French media and bloggers don’t think so – they’ve been up in arms since the announcement. While it’s debatable whether the same self-imposed rules which broadcasters apply to using Google should equally apply to social networks (and this could become very complex when it comes to setting up and offering alternatives to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts), what is crystal clear is that no amount of legislation is going to turn back the tide.

While they may face challenges from newcomers in the future, Facebook and Twitter are currently too big and too important to be ignored or removed from the picture. At the moment they are very efficiently straddling the line between commercial proposition and common property – the CSA’s ruling is unlikely to have any impact at all on their status.

This blog post was written by Steph

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