Advertising

Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) said that she is working on legislation that would mandate online political advertisements be subject to the same rules as broadcast advertisements. “And the rules that apply for ads when they’re put on TV or radio, where you have to register them and say how much you paid, that doesn’t apply to these online ads. And so our laws need to catch up with what’s going on with our campaigns,” Sen Klobuchar said. The effort comes amid the growing controversy over Facebook’s political advertising during the 2016 election. The social media company admitted last month that Russians possibly tied to the Kremlin purchased ads on the platform during the presidential race.

Facebook is going to require advertisements that are targeted to people based on "politics, religion, ethnicity or social issues" to be manually reviewed before they go live, according to an e-mail sent to advertisers. That's a higher standard than that required of most Facebook ads, which are bought and uploaded to the site through an automated system. It's also warning that it expects the new policy to slow down the launch of new ad campaigns.

The steps Facebook is taking to combat questions of Russian election interference strike at the core of the company's business. The ad buyers who spent $450 million on Facebook ads love the platform's speed and efficiency — something they fear will be diminished by inserting more human oversight of political ads before they go live. The company's action comes as a political ad disclosure bill gains momentum on Capitol Hill.

Facebook cut references to Russia from a public report in April about manipulation of its platform around the presidential election because of concerns among the company’s lawyers and members of its policy team, apparently. The drafting of the report sparked internal debate over how much information to disclose about Russian mischief on Facebook and its efforts to affect U.S. public opinion during the 2016 presidential contest.

Some at Facebook pushed to not include a mention of Russia in the report because the company’s understanding of Russian activity was too speculative, apparently. Ultimately, the 13-page report, published on April 27 and titled “Information Operations and Facebook,” was shortened by several pages by Facebook’s legal and policy teams from an earlier draft, and didn’t mention Russia at all. Rather, it concluded that “malicious actors” engaged in influence campaigns during the U.S. presidential election but said it couldn’t determine who was responsible. The extent of Facebook’s understanding at the time of Russian influence is unclear. It wasn’t until a Sept. 6 Facebook newsroom blog post that the company publicly identified Russia as a source of such efforts.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-AZ) said the panel will work to combat Russia's disinformation campaign that aims to undermine democratic governments and sow division and dissent throughout the United States. “We know that Putin’s Russia has not slowed its efforts to interfere in our elections and domestic affairs. The Senate Armed Services Committee will continue working to address this challenge, which is a threat to our national security,” Sen McCain said. Sen McCain said he is a victim of one of Russia's targeted ads, which planted a false narrative that he met with a leader from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Reps Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) and Emanual Cleaver (D-MO), two black lawmakers, sharply rebuked Twitter this week for serving as “an avenue to spread racism and bigotry” — and threatened regulation if the tech industry as a whole doesn’t identify and suspend the accounts behind those messages. The calls for action came in a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sent on Oct 3.

For them, the tipping point appears to be reports that Russian agents sought to stir political unrest ahead of the 2016 presidential election by stoking racial tensions, even running ads targeting groups like Black Lives Matter. “As a result of the far-reaching nature of Twitter’s technology, we have seen an effort to undermine our democracy, create or fan flames of racial divisions, and spread hate speech that can ultimately cumulate into violence,” the two Democratic lawmakers wrote. “We are disturbed by the ease in which foreign actors were able to manipulate your platform to advance anti-American sentiments that both exacerbates racial tension and ultimately threatens our democracy,” they continued. “More importantly, we are disappointed by the silence from you and others in your industry on ways to counter such blatant manipulation of this medium to build racial animosity, the consequences of which are quite literally life threatening.”

In June, an Apple security engineer wrote a blog post that sent the bustling, $83 billion digital ad industry reeling. In it, he described a new feature, recently rolled out in the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, to limit so-called cross-site tracking, where advertising networks and other services can monitor behavior from site to site. The feature, called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), uses machine learning to spot trackers in the act and limit their reach. The feature quickly won praise from privacy advocates–the Electronic Frontier Foundation called Apple’s move “an important step to protect your privacy.” The online advertising sector has not been as supportive.

In a letter published in Sept, a group of industry groups slammed the software rollout as harmful to ad-supported sites and consumers alike. They argue that Apple’s move substitutes the company’s standards for industrywide conventions around cookies, the digital files used to record user behavior and settings online, and will lead to consumers seeing less relevant and useful ads. Safari, the letter said, “breaks those standards and replaces them with an amorphous set of shifting rules that will hurt the user experience and sabotage the economic model for the internet.”

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, apparently. The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online.

The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by US political activists. The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, apparently. People caught up in this web of tracking and disinformation would have had no indication that they had been singled out or that the ads came from Russians.

What was in the ads you shared with Congress? How many people saw them? Most of the ads appear to focus on divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum, touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights. A number of them appear to encourage people to follow Pages on these issues. Here are a few other facts about the ads:

• An estimated 10 million people in the US saw the ads. We were able to approximate the number of unique people (“reach”) who saw at least one of these ads, with our best modeling
• 44% of total ad impressions (number of times ads were displayed) were before the US election on November 8, 2016; 56% were after the election.
• Roughly 25% of the ads were never shown to anyone. That’s because advertising auctions are designed so that ads reach people based on relevance, and certain ads may not reach anyone as a result.
• For 50% of the ads, less than $3 was spent; for 99% of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent.

Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, wants Facebook to release at least some of the controversial political ads purchased by Kremlin-backed sources.

Facebook turned over those ads — roughly 3,000 of them in total, valued at more than $100,000 — to investigators on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees earlier Oct 2. Some of the posts specifically sought to stoke racial, religious or other social tensions by stirring conflict around issues like Black Lives Matter, gun control and gay rights. Rep Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House’s panel, said he planned to work with Facebook to release “a representative sampling” of the ads to the public — just in time for a hearing slated for October on the extent to which Russia spread misinformation through social networks. The goal, Schiff said, is to “inoculate the public against future Russian interference in our elections.”

The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook in 2016 tried on quite an array of disguises. There was “Defend the 2nd,” a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page for gay rights activists, “LGBT United.” There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.

Federal investigators and officials at Facebook now believe these groups and their pages were part of a highly coordinated disinformation campaign linked to the Internet Research Agency, a secretive company in St. Petersburg, Russia, known for spreading Kremlin-linked propaganda and fake news across the web. Under intensifying pressure from Congress and growing public outcry, Facebook on Oct 2 turned over more than 3,000 of the Russia-linked advertisements from its site over to the Senate and House intelligence committees. The material is part of an attempt to learn the depth of what investigators now believe was a sprawling foreign effort spanning years to interfere with the 2016 United States presidential election.