SNOW paid people to post on X how cute its AI filter was — without saying it was an ad

SNOW Japan, the Japanese arm of the Korea-based camera-app maker Snow Corporation, paid third parties in exchange for posts about the SNOW app on X (Twitter). The paid posts praised the app's trending AI-image feature — for example '最近流行りのＡＩ加工をＳＮＯＷでやったら、パワパフ風しずくちゃんになった！かわいい！' (I ran that trending AI processing in SNOW and turned into a Powerpuff-style character — cute!) — with images attached, from display from 11 April 2025.

SNOW Japan did not disclose that the posts were requested and paid. Because the posts' commercial origin was not apparent, consumers could not tell they were looking at the business's own advertising, making the display one where the viewer could not recognise the posts as a business representation.

Snow Corporation had delegated the Japanese display decisions to SNOW Japan, so both companies were treated as responsible. On 6 August 2026 the Consumer Affairs Agency issued a corrective order under Article 5(3) of the Premiums and Representations Act — the stealth-marketing notification — requiring the paid posts to stop and the violation to be publicised.

The CAA's corrective order stopped the posts and publicised the violation, making the bought buzz visible as advertising.

Paying for posts and hiding that they were paid made word-of-mouth look organic when it was a bought campaign

A beauty app's credibility rests on being trendy — faking the trend on X manufactured exactly the buzz fans were meant to trust

Routing the deception through a Japanese subsidiary made the ad's commercial origin deliberately invisible to local users

A post you paid for is advertising, and it must be identifiable as such. When the payment is hidden, the 'organic buzz' is a bought illusion — and every viewer is misled about what drove the praise.

The corrective order required SNOW Japan to stop paying for undisclosed X posts, publicise to consumers that the display violated the Act, take steps to prevent recurrence, and refrain from similar displays. The case is a direct example of Japan's stealth-marketing enforcement reaching a foreign app operator through its local unit.