(Bloomberg) -- Forces are aligning to bring some sunlight to the political dark arts as they're practiced on social media. Last week, Congress held a hearing to discuss a bill that would require new disclosures for online political ads, and a bigger confrontation looms Tuesday when executives from Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc., and Alphabet Inc.'s Google come to the hill to discuss Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Tech platforms, understandably worried that the salad days of benign neglect from regulators are numbered, are scrambling to head off new rules by proposing ways to increase transparency on their own. At the least, it seems possible that online advertising will soon be subject to some version of the rules that apply to political ads on TV. But drawing a line around political activity on social media is tricky no matter who is wielding the pencil. That's partially because it's hard to define what counts as political activity, and also hard to define what counts as advertising.
The challenges are usefully illustrated in Twitter's new policy on disclosures in advertising last week. On Tuesday, the company said it would start distinguishing electioneering ads — that is, ads related to people running for political office — with purple tags, while also restricting the targeting options for such ads. This isn't an entirely new policy. Twitter first unrolled purple-tinted political disclosures in 2011, in anticipation that the Federal Election Commission would take action itself. But the FEC requirements never came, in part due to aggressive lobbying from Facebook, and other tech platforms didn't follow Twitter's lead. The company had always argued that it wasn't actually required to provide the disclosures. It apparently realized there was little advantage to the practice, and eventually phased them out.
That the purple tags are coming back now reveals a basic dynamic of self-regulation: it tends to ramp up when people are paying attention, but die off once the heat dissipates. There's considerable skepticism directed at new promises from Twitter and Facebook, which has also found religion on the issue of transparency in advertising. “The companies could change their mind at any moment!” tweeted Meredith McGehee, chief of policy at Issue One, an advocacy group working to reduce the role of money in politics. She argued that any new rules needed to be written into law.
But what rules to write? Twitter's purple tags wouldn't show up on a wide range of the political activity that has caused concern in recent months. When people connected to the Russian government set out to influence American politics, they focused on hot-button social issues, rather than explicit advocacy for any one candidate. “We are committed to stricter policies around issue-based ads,” Twitter wrote on Tuesday, but it provided no hints as to how it might do that.
The Honest Ads Act, a bill introduced earlier this month by Senators Mark Warner, Amy Klobuchar and John McCain, would tackle such advertising. It would require large tech platforms to disclose who purchased ads carrying “a message relating to any political matter of national importance,” including elections or national legislative issues. Even this language wouldn't address advertising that seeks to stoke outrage around politically charged social issues that don't have ties to live legislative debates. And regulations on broadly defined political speech become more likely to run into objections that they're restricting freedom of expression.
Facebook has also recently committed to increasing its scrutiny of the advertising that runs on its site. It is adding over 1,000 people to review advertising, and says it will improve its automated review systems as well. It is also requiring political advertisers to disclose when they're running election ads. The company will mark those ads as political.
The trickiest part about regulating online advertising, though, is agreeing on what advertising is. Tech platforms are communication laundering operations, allowing messages to enter the system as advertising, only to transform into what Silicon Valley refers to as “organic” communication. A Facebook message from a political group could start its life as a regular old organic post, turn into an ad when the group pays to show it to people of certain demographics, then cease to be an ad when those targeted users start reposting it for their own friends to see.
In prepared testimony to Congress, Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch acknowledged that 11.4 million people in the U.S. saw advertisements posted by the Internet Research Agency, a secretive company based out of St. Petersburg known for pushing Kremlin propaganda. He said that approximately eleven times that many people saw organic posts that the company created.
To many advertisers, the purpose of their paid advertising is indistinguishable from the messaging they distribute for free. One of primary services that ad sales teams at tech companies actually provide to campaigns are tips for reaching and influencing people with organic messaging. The mark of a good digital strategist is the ability to recreate the impact of a paid ad with free messages.
“Everyone wants to tap into these platforms' organic distribution, rather than paying for it,” said Anton Vuljaj, who worked on political ad sales for Google until 2014, and more recently has advised Republican candidates about online strategies.
Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, an advocacy group focused on political transparency, said lawmakers should pass new rules on political advertising, but with the full realization that they're only dealing with a small slice of the issue. It's not just politics. Companies pay people to post messages promoting their products, and coordinated accounts managed by professionals shill for various points of view. In many cases, there's no way to identify this communication as advertising, and there's too much else flowing through our feeds to monitor it all. Howard sees the future as a sort of continuous triage. New rules would help, and energy from tech companies is essential, but there's a long slog ahead. “The intricacies of dealing with unpaid speech are going to be difficult for our entire lives,” said Howard.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Emily Biuso at ebiuso@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack
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