Facebook could still be weaponized again for the 2018 midterms
Imagine for a moment that it's September 2018. The midterm elections are heating up, and you've decided you want to do absolutely anything you can to make sure your member of Congress is not re-elected. Well, good news: If you have a credit card and a Facebook account, there's a way you can spend unlimited amounts of money to do just that -- and there's no law, no regulation, no mechanism of any kind to stop you.
Offline, there are laws and rules about campaign spending and donations that are enforced. You can't give a candidate more than $2,700 in a cycle. If you want to run a TV ad, you need to be careful about what you actually say in the ad, and disclose that it is an ad and who is responsible for it.
Facebook and its competitor social networks, though, are part of a largely unregulated Wild West of political spending, a reality to which legislators and regulators are only now starting to awaken, after the disclosure that a Russian troll farm purchased $100,000 worth of ads on Facebook during the 2016 election.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday that he wants to make political ads on the platform "more transparent" -- in other words, for the most part, making them more like campaign ads on TV, where they come with a disclaimer identifying who is responsible for them.
However, unlike TV, many of the political ads purchased on Facebook don't fit the traditional definition of a "political ad." And even after Zuckerberg's announcement, Facebook hasn't said what exactly they'll term a political ad that must come with a disclaimer and be made public. At least some of the $100,000 worth of politically-themed ads linked to a Russian troll farm purchased during the 2016 election that Facebook has disclosed, which according to what Facebook has said were not traditional campaign ads, may not have been subject to any of the new policies Zuckerberg described.
Unless Facebook is planning a far more radical change to its business than it has suggested so far, if you wanted to, you could go on the site tomorrow and spend unlimited sums making sure that people see a story harmful to the chances of a candidate you oppose and it would likely go unchecked. A major donor with a few hundred million dollars burning a hole in their pocket could do the same.
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