Making All Ads “Honest” Through Transparency, Limited Targeting, and Enforcement

The targeted advertising debate in the United States has focused on the issue of online political advertising, particularly platforms’ responsibility to police the veracity of politicians’ claims, but this narrow focus is misguided, as are the proposed solutions. Aside from the inevitable First Amendment challenges that would arise from any government attempt to force platforms to fact-check political speech, it is doubtful that they would be able to do so accurately and fairly, especially at the scale at which they operate.¹

Other rules that govern broadcast and print advertising by political candidates and campaigns do not currently apply online, leaving platforms in the position of setting and enforcing the norms for a growing portion of American electoral discourse. The proposed Honest Ads Act, first introduced in Congress in 2017, would require online advertising platforms to maintain a "public file" database with detailed information about the political ads they serve—similar to existing requirements for broadcast media—including who paid for each ad and how much it cost. Critically, the Honest Ads Act goes beyond platforms’ current voluntary disclosures by including targeting information.² The bill is unlikely to advance before the next election. For the time being, online political advertising is entirely unregulated, leaving platforms to set their own rules.

While Twitter and Google rolled out bans on targeting users by political affiliation in late 2019, Facebook in early January 2020 clarified that it would not follow suit, instead announcing changes that would make its political ad library easier to navigate and granting users somewhat more control over how many political ads they see—albeit on an opt-out basis.³ As noted above, these voluntary ad libraries do not include targeting information, a key requirement of the proposed Honest Ads Act.⁴

Thus, as of May 2020, it remains possible to target users with political advertising on Facebook (but not on Twitter or any of Google’s platforms, including YouTube) in three powerful ways. First, individuals can be targeted if advertisers upload custom lists from off-platform data, including voter registration rolls, donor lists to parties and candidates, lists of subscribers to emails from parties and candidates, etc.⁵ Second, platforms can algorithmically generate new audiences that are similar to an uploaded custom list in terms of demographics, interests, and other data points. And third, advertisers can select which audience categories they want to reach, based on audience categories and profiles that Facebook has created from people’s online and offline activities, such as the content they post, the accounts and pages they follow, the content they like or otherwise engage with, their credit card purchases, and the known and/or inferred political affiliation of the other users they are connected to on the platform.

All three tactics allow political advertisers to send different messages and even contradictory ones to different groups of users. In both 2016 and 2018, African American internet users (African Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic)⁶ in swing states were targeted with ads designed to suppress voter turnout, whether by providing false information about when, where, and how to vote or by flooding their newsfeeds with negative ads about the advertiser’s opponent.⁷ The platforms now prohibit ads that mislead voters about the voting process, but it’s unclear how effectively this policy is enforced.

While enacting the Honest Ads Act and limiting targeting for political ads are important and urgent steps, Congress must go beyond the narrow definition of “electioneering communications” to safeguard democracy from algorithmic manipulation by both foreign and domestic actors.⁸ Currently, political advertisers self-identify as such, and there is no way of knowing how many neglect to do so and consequently are not included in the existing ad libraries. Any ad database as required by the Honest Ads Act, would run into the same enforcement problem. Moreover, drawing a clear line around political and issue ads is a vexing conundrum, as the controversy surrounding Twitter’s October 2019 decision to ban all political ads demonstrates. CEO Jack Dorsey’s initial announcement⁹ indicated that issue ads, including those from public-interest organizations, would be covered by the ban, but the final policy issued a few weeks later was more narrow.¹⁰ No matter where the line is drawn, any database of political ads, as the Honest Ads Act would require, would miss a significant number of politically relevant paid messages, just as the current voluntary ad libraries do. This alone is reason enough to expand the advertising transparency requirement to all online ads.

In addition to these definitional and enforcement issues, the current infodemic has made it clear that ads need not be related to elections to raise serious concerns. Online advertising transparency requirements must go beyond the scope of the Honest Ads Act and include non-political ads as well. This will allow regulators as well as independent researchers to verify that platforms, and their advertisers, are complying with applicable laws and the platforms’ own rules. Such transparency would further enable credible, empirical research on the state of online advertising and its impact on political life, public health, and other important issues. Moreover, it would provide crucial oversight over platforms’ respect for the law (notably the Civil Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, and various public accommodation laws) and enforcement of their own rules.

As problematic as the rules themselves are, uneven enforcement—by the company of its own rules—exacerbates the extent to which people are being targeted and manipulated in ways that clearly violate users’ information and non-discrimination rights. Neither Google, Facebook, nor Twitter include data about their ad policy enforcement in their transparency reports that disclose data related to the moderation of user-generated content. Recent reporting, including the aforementioned Consumer Reports experiment with ads containing clear coronavirus misinformation, demonstrates the inadequacy of Facebook’s ad review process. While investigative journalists have not exposed similar failures in Google’s or Twitter’s ad review systems, this should not be taken as evidence that these systems function well. More oversight is sorely needed, and a universal database for all online advertising would be a key step in that direction.