You’re not the only one wondering if that social media star really used a hot new phone. The Federal Trade Commission and seven states have sued Google and iHeartMedia for running allegedly “deceptive” Pixel 4 ads. Promos aired between 2019 and 2020 featured influencers that extolled the features of phones they reportedly didn’t own — Google didn’t even supply Pixels before most of the ads were recorded, officials said.

iHeartMedia and 11 other radio networks ran the Pixel 4 ads in ten large markets. They aired about 29,000 times. It’s not clear how many people listened to the commercials.

The FTC aims to bar Google and iHeartMedia from making any future misleading claims about ownership. It also asks both companies to prove their compliance through reports. The states, including Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York and Texas, have also issued judgments demanding the firms pay $9.4 million in penalties.

Google spokesperson José Castañeda told Engadget in a statement that the company was “pleased” to address the situation and took advertising laws “seriously.” He added that Google didn’t see this as a lawsuit (it’s technically a proposed FTC order and state judgments), and that the tech giant was only settling with six out of the seven states.

Misrepresentative phone ads are far from new. Huawei and Samsung have both been caught passing off stock DSLR photos as representative of their phone cameras. There’s also a history of celebrities marketing phones it’s not clear they use. Gal Gadot had to defend herself against claims she pitched Huawei phones while posting on Twitter from an iPhone, for instance (it was her publicist).

However, the accusations here are more serious. The FTC and participating states are contending that Google set out to use false testimonials. It had a “blatant disrespect” for truth-in-ads rules, according to FTC consumer protection director Samuel Levine. While the punishment is tiny compared to the antitrust penalties Google has faced so far, it could damage trust in the company’s campaigns for newer Pixels and other hardware.

Source: Engadget – Google sued by FTC and seven states over ‘deceptive’ Pixel 4 ads

Elon Musk has taken aim at Apple’s App Store policies amid claims that the company has “threatened to withhold” Twitter from its store. According to Musk, Apple “won’t tell us why” it has an issues with Twitter, but the threats have

In subsequent tweets, Musk railed against Apple’s 30 percent “tax” on in-app purchases, and claimed the App Store owner has “censored” other developers. He also said that Apple “has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter.” (Apple wouldn’t be the first major advertiser to do so in recent weeks.)

This wouldn’t be the first time Apple has taken issue with Twitter. In an op-ed recently published byThe New York Times, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, said that Apple’s App Store reviewers often flagged content on Twitter during its app review process.

“In my time at Twitter, representatives of the app stores regularly raised concerns about content available on our platform,” Roth wrote, saying that app reviewers had flagged instances of racial slurs and nudity on the service. “Even as they appear to be driven largely by manual checks and anecdotes, these review procedures have the power to derail company plans and trigger all-hands-on-deck crises for weeks or months at a time.”

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Musk didn’t specify if Apple is holding new updates to the service or threatening to remove the app from its store altogether. However, there are a number of recent issues that could have flagged Twitter for additional scrutiny.

On Sunday, The Guardianreported that Twitter had initially failed to pull “freshly uploaded” video of a 2019 terror attack at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, until government officials alerted the company to its existence. There has also been widespread concern from activists over the rise in hate speech and reinstatement of high-profile accounts who were banned for breaking Twitter’s hate speech policies. Musk also recently stated he planned to give “amnesty” to previously-banned accounts.

Apple has strict, if unevenly enforced, rules that govern the content that can appear in apps in its store. Parler, a “free speech” rival to Twitter, was removed from the App Store for months due to its lax content moderation rules (the app was reinstated after it rolled out an AI-based moderation system). In 2018, Tumblr banned adult content following a brief removal from the App Store.

Source: Engadget – Elon Musk claims Apple has ‘threatened to withhold’ Twitter from the App Store