New Facebook rules requiring political advertisers to identify themselves will make midterm elections more transparent, but the social media giant’s founder and a Democratic senator agree that they don’t go far enough.
“We need to pass our #HonestAds Act, so that other platforms play by the same rules, just like broadcast, cable and satellite providers,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia wrote on Twitter.
The measure, co-sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and John McCain, an Arizona Republican, was introduced in response to Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 presidential campaign through ads on Facebook as well as Twitter and Google.
Glad to see Facebook introducing transparency requirements for issue ads, a measure I proposed last year along with @AmyKlobuchar & @SenJohnMcCain. We need to pass our #HonestAds Act so that other platforms play by the same rules, just like broadcast, cable & satellite providers. https://t.co/gZT3Zfj6aT
— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) May 8, 2018
“The content and purchasers of those online advertisements are a mystery to the public because of outdated laws that have failed to keep up with evolving technology,” the senators said when the bill was introduced in October 2017. It has languished since in the Committee on Rules and Administration.
Passing the measure “would would prevent foreign actors from influencing our elections by ensuring that political ads sold online are covered by the same rules as ads sold on TV, radio, and satellite,” they argued at the time, a goal that Warner said remains important today.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who supports the bill, has moved forward on his own amid criticism that his company’s failure to prevent fake news articles and misleading ads helped Trump, a New York real estate mogul, win a race against Democrat Hillary Clinton that he was widely expected to lose.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has introduced artificial-intelligence tools that removed tens of thousands of fake accounts prior to 2017 elections in France and Germany and a special election in Alabama to fill the Senate seat of Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s attorney general.
The next step in Facebook’s efforts is requiring that every buyer of political or issue ads verify their identities and locations, the company says. The ads will be labeled, and buyers will have to show users who paid for them.
“We’re starting this in the U.S. and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months,” Zuckerberg said in April. “For even greater political ads transparency, we have also built a tool that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is running. We’re testing this in Canada now, and we’ll launch it globally this summer.”
Trump, meanwhile, has denied any collusion with the Kremlin during his campaign. His firing of former FBI Director James Comey, whose agency was investigating the claims, led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, whose probe the president routinely refers to as a “witch hunt.”
Earlier this year, the allegations of fake news gained renewed scrutiny when Facebook revealed that a Trump campaign consultant, Cambridge Analytica, had improperly gained access to information on 87 million of its users. In the aftermath, Zuckerberg testified before two congressional committees, promising to better protect user information and weed out misleading information and phony profiles while providing more information on advertisers.
By themselves, the new ad standards “won’t stop all people trying to game the system,” he noted. “But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads. Election interference is a problem that’s bigger than any one platform, and that’s why we support the Honest Ads Act. This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online.”
