Affiliate Disclosure Compliance

Affiliate Disclosure Compliance

Check one piece of affiliate or influencer content against disclosure regulations and return a compliance review: pass/fail per requirement, with placement, wording, and per-format fixes. Built for program managers reviewing partner and creator content before publication, and remediating what is already live. The legal basis is the FTC's clear-and-conspicuous standard (16 CFR 255.0(f)), CAP Code rule 2.1, the UCPD, and national overlays; the checklist itself is this skill's own working tool, not an official named framework.

A Compliance Review, Not Legal Advice

1. State before reviewing anything: "This is a compliance review against published regulator rules, not legal advice. Counsel owns the legal call; this review finds what counsel and regulators would find."
2. Mark every counsel-grade ambiguity inline with [COUNSEL: <question>], attached to the affected finding, never pooled at the end of the report.
3. Always escalate: whether the poster is a "trader" under EU law, regulated verticals (health, finance, alcohol, gambling), children's audiences, active regulator contact, and any market not covered by the references.
4. Repeat the disclaimer with the delivered report; instruct the user to keep every marker until counsel resolves it.

Ambiguity flagged inline stays attached to the evidence that raised it; a footer disclaimer gets skimmed past and the nuance is lost.

Interview

Ask one question per message; offer multiple-choice answers; skip anything already answered or evident from the artefact.

• Which jurisdictions is the audience in? US / UK / EU, and which member states (Germany, France, Italy, other)?
• Content format? Short-form video / livestream / story or ephemeral / static image post / long-form video / podcast or audio / blog or review article / newsletter or email / affiliate roundup or comparison page.
• Which platform(s) will it run on?
• Relationship type? Paid post / affiliate-commission-only / gifted product / unpaid ambassador / employee or insider / agency-intermediated.
• B2B or B2C audience, or both?
• Pre-publication, or already live? Live shifts the output toward remediation.
• What artefact do you actually have? Caption text / script / transcript / URL / screenshot / the rendered post.
• By when must the result land? A scheduled publish date / a live violation already earning impressions / no fixed date.
• One-off or compounding? Clear this asset only, or also stand up monitoring and a wording bank that keep clearing assets.
• Effort ceiling? Hours available per review cycle, whether anyone can gate publication, and whether the program terms already back withholding commission or terminating a partner.

Re-rank the menus in Ranked Choices against the last three answers, and name the move out loud:

• A live violation still earning impressions promotes the fastest remediation rung.
• A compounding mandate promotes the wording bank and the pre-publication gate.
• A ceiling of a few hours per cycle deletes the full-roster review and every rung the program terms do not already back.

Review Workflow

1. Deliver the not-legal-advice statement, then run the Interview.
2. Confirm scope: this skill reviews content. Drafting program terms, briefs, or contract clauses belongs to sibling skills (see Reference).
3. Inspect the artefact. If you can view images or fetch the URL, review the rendered asset exactly as a viewer meets it. Otherwise review the provided text and mark visual/audio checks "not assessable from the artefact provided": never guess what the frame shows.
4. Load the jurisdiction references for every market the interview surfaced: references/us-ftc-standard.md, references/uk-and-eu-rules.md.
5. If you can browse the web, re-verify penalty figures and regulator guidance before citing them: caps are inflation-adjusted and guidance gets revised. Otherwise label each figure "as of drafting, re-verify".
6. Run the six-layer check below for every applicable jurisdiction.
7. Write the per-asset report: verdict, findings with cited rules, one concrete rewritten fix per failure. Shape below; worked examples in references/review-report-example.md.
8. For already-live content, add a remediation plan built from the Remediation Ladder below: the rung chosen per asset, the order across assets, and a note that 16 CFR 255.1(d) states advertisers _should_ remediate non-compliance they know of. Write it as the FTC's stated expectation, never as a standalone statutory duty, since Part 255 is interpretive guidance and not a safe harbour: the enforceable exposure runs through FTC Act Section 5. Attach [COUNSEL] if the user intends to assert the obligation to a partner.
9. Flag genuinely unsettled points with [COUNSEL] instead of asserting an answer.
10. Recommend one monitoring approach and one guidance route from Ranked Choices when the interview shows the program has neither: name the rung above the recommendation and the condition that promotes it.
11. Iterate until the completeness threshold in Measurement passes.
12. If your harness has persistent memory, memorize the program's jurisdiction set, approved wording bank, and each partner's recurring failures: later reviews start faster and repeat offenders surface. Otherwise ask the user to keep the report for the next review.

The Six-Layer Check

Judge each layer per jurisdiction; a single fail on any layer fails the asset.

These six layers are gates, not a menu: they carry no efficiency ranking and never will. A legal disclosure obligation is not a trade-off; never run the two highest-ratio layers, skip the rest, and call the asset reviewed.

No layer has a discounted version that partially passes, and no cheaper check anywhere in this skill substitutes for one. Rank the delivery choices around the review (see Ranked Choices); never the obligations themselves.

1. Presence: does any disclosure exist? Any material connection triggers the duty: payment, commission, free product, free trial, employment, family relationship. A gift is not an exemption.
2. Wording: is the label unambiguous? Check against references/disclosure-wording.md. "#ad", "advertising", "paid partnership with [brand]" pass; "#sp", "#collab", "ambassador", "thanks to [brand]" fail.
3. Placement and prominence: apply the 16 CFR 255.0(f) factors, judged separately for visual, audible, and interactive media, and always uncontradicted by anything else in the content. See references/us-ftc-standard.md for the factor breakdown per media type.
4. Per-format requirements: check the format's row in references/format-placement-rules.md: in-video and spoken for video, periodic repeats for livestreams, overlays for stories, link-adjacent disclosure for roundups.
5. Truncation and portability: does the disclosure survive the caption "more" cut, embeds, screenshots, and cross-posts? A platform-native paid-partnership label alone is never sufficient: FTC and CMA both say so, and the label itself may not travel off-platform.
6. Jurisdiction overlays: Germany's rebuttable payment presumption, France's mandatory "publicité"/"collaboration commerciale" mention, Italy's Digital Chart format rules, the CMA's accepted-label list. See references/uk-and-eu-rules.md.

Ranked Choices: Monitoring, Guidance, Remediation

Three genuine menus sit around the obligations above:

• How assets reach this review.
• How the rules reach partners.
• How a live violation gets cured.