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I'm surprised so many people look at the question as a legal "can they keep it to themselves" instead of conscientious "should they warn the viewer"

Its not a health and safety hazard what are they warning the viewer of? Whether they work for kabam or not. Its not a scenario that warrants a warning. It's up to them to share purely out of choice its not an obligation. The situation is not any deeper than that

To the people who think they should disclose, what relevance does working for kabam have to do with their content?

Every creator in the CCP who is employed by Kabam in any way is known to the community. There are no "secretly employed" content creators.

I do agree there needs to be a disclosure of that, though. But there always has been.

Wow! Thanks for this info!

So if a YouTuber who is in the CCP does work for Kabam in any way it's known - nobody secretly works for them aside from who we already have been informed of.

Has this always been the case? Because I know when Karate Mike was doing work for Kabam he was asked directly about it in streams and didn't respond, it was only subsequently that he did a post officially announcing it. I feel like he was the first person that has it happened to.

Aside from Karate Mike, which other members of the CCP are also employees? I know you said it's known to the community. Is there a list of all CCP members and from that a list of CCP members who also work for Kabam? I only know of:

- Dork Lessons
- Karate Mike
- Daddy Long Legs
- Metal Sonic Dude

Can you add any more?

You're asking an unintentionally bizarre question. Let's start with the fact that i would argue none of those people are in fact members of the CCP.

The CCP is a program originally created to work with content creators (originally, Youtube video creators) by offering them early access to upcoming content (originally, new champions, but later all sorts of content) so that they could work on video content related to that MCOC content and be prepared to release it when that MCOC content itself released. This way the content creators could be talking about what new stuff was happening in the game as it happened at a higher quality, which benefitted the content creators and the game. The program consists of three main parts: an NDA agreement which governs what the content creators can disclose and when (it is the primary means of enforcing embargos on new content information), access to the beta test server where things like new content and new champions can be granted and tested without altering live accounts, and access to the CCP discord, where content creators can discuss the game and the content directly with the developers.

No employee of Kabam would need to be a member of the CCP to gain access to any of these things. Employees are already non-disclosed as part of their employment contracts. Employees can probably request beta access directly. And employees obviously already have access to the devs: they can just walk up to them and chat. Those four individuals might have been members of the CCP at one time, but I think that their status changed when they became employees. Assuming MSD is an employee: I don't recall if he explicitly stated he was or not (he could be a contractual hire).

There's no handbook or anything governing this, but one thing CCP members are supposed to is disclose the fact that they are members of the CCP whenever they make content using information received through the program. This is often implicit when they simply state that their footage came from the CCP server, but technically they are supposed to say that. Furthermore, there's a general rule that they are not supposed to state or imply that they are Kabam employees or officially represent Kabam in their content. Obviously, a Kabam employee can't honor that stipulation because they actually are employees, so (presumably) employees have separate terms spelled out to them if they happen to be (or become) public facing content creators. Most companies like this have rules against astroturfing, for example.

The CCP is a program for outsiders to gain access to Kabam. It would be somewhat nonsensical for a Kabam employee to also be a member of the program since the CCP program can offer them nothing they don't already have. Content creators who previously operated within the CCP have gone on to become employees, but as there is no Avengers moment when Tony Stark promoted them, I can see how that distinction might not be obvious.

Why this matters when discussing disclosure is I believe to the extent any ethical standard exists, the employee relationship takes precedence. In other words, it would not be a proper disclosure for a Kabam employee to disclose they were a CCP member and not an employee. There are exceptions and caveats to that, but I believe in general an employee saying their information came from the content creator program would be misleading.

I say there are caveats because there's a huge difference between the dude working in the mail room failing to identify themselves as a Kabam employee on their twitch channel and one of the champion designers doing the same while reviewing one of their own designs, say. But those nuances would be very difficult to identify from the outside.

Thanks for your response and contribution.

I think one of the things that's come out of this thread is that there's a number of mitigating, and aggravating factors:

1. The spectrum of what constitutes a "Kabam employee" and the duration and/or number of hours you do for Kabam.

2. There's also debate about how big your YouTube channel is and whether your sphere of influence beaches the threshold.

3. Then there's also the discussion around the nature of your YouTube content - i.e. are you protecting Kabam and carefully curating what messaging you put in front of your audience (or hide from them)? Or conversely, do you just make guides on his to beat content? E.g. MCOC NOOB type content

To conflate being an employee with just being a member of the CCP diverts focus away from the core issue - "Should an influential MCOC YouTuber who works for Kabam in a meaningful way disclose to viewers to mitigate the effects of a conflict of interest?"

In my opinion, only two things matter (well, three, but hold that thought). One: conflict of interest. Two: appearance of impropriety.

It would be an actual conflict of interest to be an employee of Kabam and present yourself to the audience as a neutral third party. I’m not saying an employee can’t be objective or critical, but even the most objective person alive would be subject to certain skews of perspective as an employee. They would be privy to information no outsider would have access to that would influence their opinions about things like, say, whether Kabam was doing enough to fix an issue. It would be hard to believe they were not doing enough when all your friends were working overtime on it, for example. Disclosing that relationship allows viewers to make up their own minds as to whether to judge your opinions reasonably free of bias.

Even if you are an employee and disclose that fact, there are still conflicts of interest possible that can require further disclosure. If I were DLL, for example, I would make it a point to disclose when I was making a video about a champion i myself explicitly designed (which is a thing I’m pretty sure he actually does), separate from reviewing something that was not my own work, to further disclose any specific source of bias.

Completely separate from that, even if there is no actual conflict of interest there can be the appearance of one, and those should be disclosed purely from a credibility perspective. If you don’t disclose and then one day it comes to light, it will be much more difficult to argue no actual conflict existed, when you elected not to disclose. There will be, in the eyes of many, a presumption of a conflict if it was perceived as actively hidden.

I don’t believe how many subs you have matters. I don’t believe the reach of individual creators matters. I think those are generalities that matter within the larger discussion of whether disclosure should happen in general. Content creators in general have a reach, they in general have influence, and they in general have the trust of a significant percentage of their viewership. Because of these generalities, all of them should follow the same ethical guidelines, because they themselves cannot be an objective judge of whether the rules should apply to themselves.

There is, of course, a third thing that enters into the discussion, and that is the legal or regulatory environment. That’s a much more complex discussion. In general, however, the CCP members are not financially compensated, and thus would avoid most of those requirements in general. Employees are a different matter, but that’s a legal grey area.