Despite Transparency Rules, Political Facebook Ads Still Obscuring Origins

Facebook has enacted several new policies throughout 2018 to try and prevent the kind of misinformation campaigns that plagued the site during the 2016 presidential election. However, multiple reports published Wednesday indicate Facebook’s new ad transparency policy is already being undermined.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic reported that one of the biggest political ad buyers on Facebook, News For Democracy, is able to operate without really disclosing what it is or where its money comes from. The Daily Beast also reported on News For Democracy’s unknown origins in September.

News For Democracy runs several pages that target left-leaning political ads to specific audiences. The Atlantic found that News For Democracy is run, at least in part, by a separate company called MotiveAI. That company’s website contains little information and its Twitter account has not tweeted since its creation in March.

News For Democracy is an example of how Facebook’s new ad transparency rules can be undermined. Facebook users can see who paid for any political ad on the site, but the ad’s real origins can be obscured by limited liability companies, or LLCs, created specifically for that purpose.

Using this tactic, it is theoretically possible for a foreign entity to fund a political ad in the United States, which is what Facebook is trying to avoid. News For Democracy spent millions on ads in the past several months as one of the site’s top political ad buyers.

A separate New York Times report published Wednesday found that right-wing attack ads aimed at Virginia Democrat Jennifer Wexton had similarly murky origins. The disclosure page on Facebook simply said: “Paid for by a freedom loving American Citizen exercising my natural law right, protected by the 1st Amendment and protected by the 2nd Amendment.”

Facebook verifies the identities of ad buyers, but does not disclose that information to the public. An ad buyer can run an ad on Facebook and put whatever they want in the disclosure field, meaning the anti-Wexton ads did not break current Facebook rules. That said, a Facebook spokesperson told the Times that the company was working on the issue.

Facebook has tried to increase public trust in its ability to hold up during an election with new fact-checking efforts and other new policies. Twitter also introduced similar ad transparency rules.