Advertising

Google and Facebook are looking to make an early imprint on legislation being drafted in the House and Senate that would force them and other online networks to disclose information about the buyers of political ads. Lobbyists from the Silicon Valley behemoths have met with the staffs of Sens Mark Warner (D-VA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA), all of whom are drawing up bills that would impose new regulations on the industry. The Senate bill is expected to be formally introduced next week.

It is not clear when the House legislation, which has not been previously reported, will be introduced. The companies are keen to show steps they've taken to police themselves when it comes to monitoring and disclosing the ads on their sites, efforts that could be used to fend off heavy-handed regulation as investigations into Russian interference in the election bring unprecedented scrutiny on their businesses.

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg met with House leaders on Capitol Hill to brief them on the social media platform’s investigation into alleged Russian use of the site to influence the 2016 presidential campaign. Following Sandberg’s meeting with the House Intelligence Committee, the panel’s top members said that they would be making public the 3,000 ads purchased by Russian groups during the campaign that Facebook handed over to congressional investigators.

Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) said that in addition to the ads, Facebook would also be turning over data on how many people the fake Kremlin-linked accounts were able to reach beyond their paid advertisements. “Obviously, we’re going to want to get a complete sense of what the Russians were doing on their platforms and others,” Schiff said. “Not just the advertising but all the downstream consequences of that advertising, all the things that they were pushing out through non-advertising means on these platforms."

The conversation about Facebook would benefit from more facts, and less speculation. So this week, I sent a list of some of my unanswered questions to Facebook. Two representatives — Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, and Joe Osborne, a company spokesman — responded to several questions in some detail. The company declined to answer several other questions, but I include those here as well, in hopes that they might one day be answered. Below are my questions, followed by Facebook’s responses, where applicable.

As the debate intensifies around Russian ad buys in the US election, a fundamental aspect of Facebook’s platform has gone mostly overlooked. Facebook’s auction-based system rewards ads that draw engagement from users by making them cheaper, serving them to more users for less money. But the mechanics that apply to commercial ads apply to political ones as well.

Facebook has created a powerful system that dynamically, and unpredictably, changes the prices of political ads. The system also encourages polarization by incentivizing ads that users are predisposed to agree with. Unless Facebook makes its internal data public, it’s impossible to say which ads reach which audiences, or how much candidates spend to reach them.

On Oct 9, Twitter blocked a campaign video ad from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), calling the ad “inflammatory” and claiming that it violated the company’s ad guidelines. On Oct 10, Twitter changed its mind. Rep Blackburn can now promote the video, in which the self-described “hardcore, card carrying Tennessee conservative” talked about her efforts to stop “the sale of baby body parts,” in a reference to Planned Parenthood. “After further review, we have made the decision to allow the content in question from Rep. Blackburn's campaign ad to be promoted on our ads platform,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “While we initially determined that a small portion of the video used potentially inflammatory language, after reconsidering the ad in the context of the entire message, we believe that there is room to refine our policies around these issues. We have notified Rep. Blackburn's campaign of this decision."

YouTube videos of police beatings on American streets. A widely circulated internet hoax about Muslim men in Michigan collecting welfare for multiple wives. A local news story about two veterans brutally mugged on a freezing winter night. All of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the center of a far-reaching Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election. A New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape American politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms.

“This is cultural hacking,” said Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. “They are using systems that were already set up by these platforms to increase engagement. They’re feeding outrage — and it’s easy to do, because outrage and emotion is how people share.”

The Federal Election Commission is asking for public input on its disclosure rules for online political advertisements, as companies like Facebook and Google are being scrutinized by investigators for ads they ran during the 2016 presidential campaign. The FEC announced that they would be reopening the public comment period on the rules nearly a year after the last time they sought public input on the disclosure requirement.

“In light of developments since the close of the last comment period, the Commission is reopening the comment period once again to consider disclaimer requirements as applied to certain internet communications,” the announcement reads. The move comes as some lawmakers are pressing for tighter disclosure requirements in the wake of Facebook’s revelation that it had uncovered 3,000 political ads purchased by Russian actors. During the 2012 election cycle, Facebook and Google had both received exemptions from the FEC’s rules requiring that political ads feature a disclosure indicating who paid for them.

Amazon is making a serious effort to break into the digital advertising business, an arena dominated by its fellow behemoth competitors, Google and Facebook. The company is opening a new office in New York City, which it says will bring more than 2,000 jobs. The new space will also bring it closer to New York’s advertising agencies. Media agency executives have already said that they have been increasingly contacted by Amazon representatives trying to sell them and their clients ad space. Amazon has already begun to beef up its ad sales team and enhance its programmatic advertising business.

Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, apparently.

The Silicon Valley giant has found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents who aimed to spread disinformation across Google’s many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company’s DoubleClick ad network. Google runs the world’s largest online advertising business, and YouTube is the world’s largest online video site. The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook -- a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far.

The Trump presidential campaign spent most of its digital advertising budget on Facebook, testing more than 50,000 ad variations each day in an attempt to micro-target voters, President Donald Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, told CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview scheduled to air Oct 8. “Twitter is how [Trump] talked to the people, Facebook was going to be how he won,” Parscale said. Facebook provided Trump 2016 with employees who embedded in the campaign’s digital office and helped educate staffers on how to use Facebook ads, he said. Because he “wanted people who supported Donald Trump”, Parscale said, the Facebook employees were questioned on their political views. “Campaigns aren’t able to hand-pick Facebook team members to work on their projects,” the statement read, in apparent reference to Parscale’s claim, as reported by CBS, that the Facebook employees that served as “embeds” in his office “had to be partisan and he questioned them to make sure”. Parscale said the Trump campaign used Facebook to reach clusters of rural voters, such as “15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for”. “I started making ads that showed the bridge crumbling,” he said. “I can find the 1,500 people in one town that care about infrastructure. Now, that might be a voter that normally votes Democrat.”