"America Progress Now"
What a recent exposé says about the state of online political ad disclosure laws
On Friday, The Guardian published an interesting exposé that once again highlights America’s failure to bring daylight to the shadowy world of deceptive online political ads. This new report shows how a group connected to pro-Trump marketing efforts was able to obscure its true identity during the 2018 midterm elections while running Facebook ads that hyped Green Party candidates in five important Congressional races.
The pro-Green Facebook ads were purchased by a group calling itself “America Progress Now,” and the apparent aim of the campaign was to siphon votes away from Democrats in swing districts by directing liberals away from Democratic-party-endorsed candidates and toward Green Party candidates. To do this, the Trump-connected group ran Facebook ads featuring Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with messages like “We don’t need political parties” and “The revolution is winning because we are thinking for OURSELVES!” Some of the group’s other ads included exhortations that voters abandon “corporate, greedy politicians & capitalists,” and embrace socialism (or, in some cases, Democratic socialism). One ad featured a red rose icon typically associated with Democratic Socialists and said:“This November, don't vote for a party, vote for Progressive values. 🌹”
One of the most important things to note about the new revelations in The Guardian is that they’re only occurring now, nearly three years after the elections targeted by these shady Facebook ads were held.
Why did it take so long for this to come to light?
A key part of the answer seems to be the ongoing lack of progress on federal regulations for online political ads, a glaring hole in election law that remains un-mended to this day. In 2018, as now, there was nothing in the federal code requiring Facebook to disclose the true identity of “America Progress Now,” even though Facebook reportedly knew the group was a front for a conservative marketing firm. Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook data scientist who blew the whistle on Facebook’s failure to stop itself from being used for these sorts of political manipulations, told The Guardian that in 2018, Facebook’s internal, self-regulatory policies also fell short. “There were no policies at Facebook against pretending to be a group that did not exist,” she told The Guardian, describing that internal enforcement gap as “an abuse vector that has also been used by the governments of Honduras and Azerbaijan.”
Facebook has since tightened its rules for US advertisers and expanded its voluntary disclosures about their identities. But that’s all voluntary on Facebook’s part, yet another example of after-the-fact, reactive self-regulation by digital platforms that, of course, reserve the right to change such policies if future whims dictate.
Digital platforms don’t have to be given such wide latitude to police themselves. The proposed federal Honest Ads Act, first introduced in 2017, would have placed new political ad disclosure requirements on the platforms and could have made the “America Progress Now” scheme more difficult to pull off. But the Honest Ads Act went nowhere and is still languishing in Congress four years later.
The act’s provisions would require platforms like Facebook to reveal, in cases like the “America Progress Now” ads, a lot more information than Facebook was disclosing back in 2018 and considerably more information than Facebook voluntarily discloses right now about such groups. That information would include:
The name of the person purchasing the advertisement, the name, address, and phone number of a contact person for such person, and a list of the chief executive officers or members of the executive committee or of the board of directors of such person.
Had all of this information been accurately disclosed in 2018 in connection with “America Progress Now,” it would certainly not have taken three years; early reports by Vice and ProPublica about “a mysterious Facebook group” running pro-Green Party ads in tight midterm races; a subsequent formal complaint to the Federal Election Commission (which, unsurprisingly for the Trump-era FEC, led to little in the way of investigation or consequences); and the dogged work of Guardian journalist Julia Carrie Wong in order to eventually uncover the ads’ connection to Trump-world.
Because this newsletter has been tracking an under-noticed fight by Facebook to strike down unique political ad disclosure requirements presently on the books in Washington State, it’s also worth noting here that if those same Washington State requirements had been national law back in 2018, they too could have helped to quickly expose the “America Progress Now” shenanigans.
Washington’s political ad disclosure law and associated rules require digital platforms like Facebook to reveal “the names and addresses” of persons who buy political ads targeting the state’s elections. That means, according to state rules, that Facebook must reveal “the name and address of the sponsoring person or persons actually paying for the advertising… including the federal employee identification number, or other verifiable identification, if any, of an entity, so that the public can know who paid for the advertising or communication, without having to locate and identify any affiliated entities.”
Since Facebook knew the names of the Trump-boosters behind “America Progress Now,” Washington State’s disclosure regime, had it been national law, could have put pressure on the company to disclose more than just the misleading group name and apparently false street address APN had posted on Facebook.
“It would’ve helped, for sure,” said Jeremy B. Merrill, the investigative journalist who worked on the 2018 ProPublica and Vice report about the “mysterious Facebook group.” That report was unable to figure out who was really behind APN, but it did establish that what the group had publicly shared about itself on Facebook didn’t add up.
Sophie Zhang, the former Facebook data scientist who became a whistleblower, said that ill-intentioned political ad purchasers can always attempt to hide their identities by lying to Facebook from the get-go. That would then create a garbage-in-garbage-out situation in which Facebook, if required, would merely be disclosing the false information the dishonest purchaser fed them. But, Zhang said, “Much of the issue here appeared to be that Facebook knew who was behind the ads but had no interest in reporting them.” Changing federal law could change that dynamic. “If it’s required to report and the person hides, Facebook does have an interest in figuring out who’s behind it,” Zhang said.
In public comments and in a widespread ad campaign, Facebook has repeatedly stated it’s a supporter of “updated internet regulations” for America. The company also says it supports the federal Honest Ads Act. But one of the sponsors of the Honest Ads Act, Senator Amy Klobuchar, has questioned what, exactly, Facebook and its well-financed lobbying operation have actually done to get the Honest Ads Act passed. And in Washington State, as mentioned, Facebook is presently asking a judge to strike down regulations that mandate detailed disclosures about online political ads.
A report assembled last year by staff at the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, which enforces state election law, describes the state’s political ad requirements as putting Washington in “a position of strength” when it comes to giving the public “meaningful information” about paid online political speech. The report also describes Washington as “unique among states,” in that it gives “every member of the public” the right to request details about the individuals and money behind online political ad campaigns.
At the same time, Wild West has learned, Facebook and Google have recently been in private talks with staff at the Public Disclosure Commission about this unique disclosure regime. Later this month, a process that could change the current rules may be launched.
Documents requested from the Public Disclosure Commission by Wild West show that in May, Facebook sent state regulators a memo connected to the private discussions the company’s been having with the commission’s staff. The memo outlines the company’s voluntary political ad disclosure efforts through its online “Ad Library,” plus “additional steps” Facebook has taken to ensure that political ad-purchasers are telling the truth about themselves.
As The Guardian noted in its excavation of the “America Progress Now” deception, since 2018 Facebook has “made a number of updates to its policies on political ads… including requiring advertisers to provide more information about their organizations.”
But in Facebook’s May communication with Washington State regulators outlining the “additional steps” the company’s taken to promote political ad transparency, Facebook said it “does not recommend that these features be mandated” by Washington State. The reason Facebook gives for this recommendation is that “it would likely be impractical for smaller digital platforms to undertake similar efforts.”
Google, in its own document sent to Washington Sate election regulators in May, appeared to go further. It suggested that current disclosure rules be weakened so that digital platforms are only required to reveal “the names of the persons from whom [a digital platform] accepted political advertising,” rather than also having to disclose the purchaser’s address, federal identification number or similar “verifiable identification,” and details on which campaign or candidate is being supported or opposed by any particular ad.
Kim Bradford, spokesperson for the Washington Public Disclosure Commission, said that the commission’s staff—the part of the commission that’s been in private discussions with Google and Facebook recently—now “plans to recommend” that the current political ad disclosure rule be placed “on the six-month agenda” in order to “begin discussions with the Commission and the public about whether the rule should be amended, and if so, how.”
Some of the stories I’ve been reading this week:
•. The low-tax lives of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk — Detailed in ProPublica’s bombshell report on “The Secret IRS Files.”
• The ads that fund fake news sites — Nearly half of them are served by Google, according to a recent report.
• The highly tracked lives of grocery pickers — A look at the AI-monitored worklives of the people who deliver your online grocery orders.
• Five bills to take on tech monopolies — They were unveiled in the US House last week.
• “The Secret Gag Orders Must Stop” — Microsoft president Brad Smith on why “the past seven days marked another bad week for the collision between technology and democracy.”
• And a “slander industry” update —
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