: Commenting on blogs and forums I'm working on a project for company's upcoming book. We thought it would be cool for me to ccomment on blogs and forums as one of the lead child characters.

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Posting on other people's content may be seen as hijacking their audience to promote your own project. That's the only real ethical problem I see. So if you created your own blog, or commented in very public spaces that don't "belong" to anyone, you should be fine.

As for it being misleading to children... you know what? So is every other form of advertising that has ever existed. Manipulating people into buying something they normally wouldn't have is literally the whole point of advertising. If anything, I would much rather buy a book because I identified with a character, as opposed than buying something because I thought it would make me cool, or because all my friends were doing it.

You may be interested to know that some people already do this. There are a few webcomics out where the artists involved have set up fake accounts where they answer fan mail in character. I think it's quite cool.

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The marketing department for the movie Ex-Machina recently did a similar thing, they made a Tinder profile for their main character and had her 'talking' with real people who were looking for dates, then ended up linking them to the website for the movie.

This breached Tinder's Terms & Conditions, and I think there's now a massive lawsuit directed at them (but I'm not 100% on that).

Outside of the MASSIVE ethical reasons not to do it that @what has described, it is very possible you will be breaking the law on a lot of sites by marketing the product on these websites, even indirectly.

My suggestion: don't do it. Unless you want to trawl through the site's T's & C's to make sure you're not breaching their rules of use policies.

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