Rewarded UGC lives under real rules. Here's how Chorus keeps you — and your customers — on the right side of them, by design rather than by policy PDF.
Rewarding posts creates a 'material connection' under the FTC's Endorsement Guides and the 2024 Consumer Reviews Rule. Undisclosed incentivized posts risk per-violation fines — warning letters went out as recently as December 2025.
Chorus checks every submitted post for a disclosure tag (#ad, #gifted, #sponsored, or the platform's paid-partnership label) before any points accrue. Missing disclosure = the post is recorded at 0 points with a clear explanation, and the advocate is warned before submitting.
The Consumer Reviews Rule treats incentives conditioned on positive sentiment as buying reviews. Chorus's AI scorer is explicitly instructed to reward relevance, originality, authenticity, and brief adherence — and to never score positive sentiment above honest or mixed sentiment.
A customer's honest review with criticisms earns the same as a glowing post of equal quality. Brands can test this themselves in the dashboard scorer before launching.
Authorship is always consent-based: an advocate proves the account is theirs, either by connecting it via the platform's own login or by placing a one-time code in their public profile. Nothing earns without that step.
Public post data (caption, likes, views) is read either from official platform APIs or through licensed third-party data providers, depending on the account type. Personal Instagram accounts cannot use official APIs at all since Meta retired the Basic Display API in December 2024, so the provider route is what makes everyday customers eligible. We only ever read posts an advocate submits from an account they have proven, and only while it is public.
If a platform changes or revokes API access, affected campaigns degrade to a manual-review queue rather than breaking — and confirmed points are never clawed back because of API loss.
Brands own their data: advocate lists, the points ledger, and the content library are exportable at any time. Per-advocate export and deletion (GDPR/CCPA) severs identity while preserving the financial-style audit trail as pseudonymous rows.
Coupon codes are single-use, revealed only to the claiming advocate, and verified server-side at the brand's checkout.
Points are non-transferable loyalty units with no monetary value and no expiry by default. There are no cash-out thresholds because there is no cash-out — rewards come from the brand's own products and discounts.
Advocates see their full ledger (every point, with the rule that produced it), can appeal any score, and appeals are answered within 48 hours.
Chorus stores no token names, token amounts, or conversion promises, and displays a non-removable disclaimer that points confer no financial rights. Any token settlement is the project's off-platform concern, executed from an exported snapshot. Chorus itself remains a loyalty-points system.
This page is product documentation, not legal advice — run your program's specifics past your counsel.