Digital Personal Mentoring Agreement as a Tool for Regulating Internet Bloggers’ Educational Activities

The current Internet environment is almost unimaginable without bloggers – active social media participants who share content focused on particular topics on their pages, engaging a target audience (subscribers) to view and assess it. One of the most popular types of bloggers’ economic activity is the implementation of educational content on the blog platform (online courses on self-development, financial literacy, etc.). The negative legal reputation of this type of activity is largely due to the widespread problem of discrepancy between the client’s expectations for the service and the content of the information received after paying for access to the training course, the methods of its delivery, and the interaction with the instructor during the training. Purpose: To substantiate the optimal agreement design for bloggers to deliver educational content to their subscribers, ensuring the protection of Internet users’ rights against the identified risks. Methods: General philosophical research methods (materialistic, dialectical) provide the opportunity to examine socio-economic processes involving bloggers in the digital environment, in their interrelation with current trends in civil turnover, and also taking into account the objectively existing needs for legal regulation. Using general scientific methods (logical, systemic structural, axiological), the qualitative features of the relationships between bloggers and subscribers, established on the Internet within the framework of influencers’ educational activities, are revealed, including their value basis, prerequisites for their emergence, and specifics of development. A set of specific scientific methods (dogmatic, systemic, interpretation of legal norms) allows for the identification of the true meaning of legal provisions applicable to the studied relations, contradictions between them, and gaps requiring elimination. Results: the author substantiates that the nature of the relations arising between the blogger and subscribers is better suited to a fiduciary agreement for digital personal mentoring, considered as a specific type of agreement for services provision. Under such an agreement, the mentor (blogger) undertakes to act in the interests of the mentee (subscriber), providing him/her with information, assistance and support in setting and achieving goals in the field of personal or professional development. An essential condition of the personal mentoring agreement is the form of mentor’s personal participation in the activity of setting and achieving the relevant goals. The chosen methods, sequence, and regularity of engagement with the mentee should be adequate to ensure that the mentor’s actions are considered direct efforts in experience transfer, assistance, and support.