"They're not stopping people"
"They're not stopping people"
At a time when the President of the United States is accusing Facebook of “killing people” with vaccine misinformation, the social media platform’s ongoing failure to enforce a self-imposed ban on local political ads in Washington State may seem like small potatoes. And relatively speaking, it is. No one is going to die because Facebook has, for the third election cycle in a row, violated its own Washington State ad ban, this time by selling political ads to around a dozen local campaigns since the beginning of the year.
But these sales of supposedly banned Facebook ads, targeted at voters in all corners of Washington State, illustrate a theme running through many of the company’s larger failures. Whether it’s Facebook’s failure to stop itself from recommending anti-vaccine groups, its failure to stop itself from selling discriminatory ads, its failure to stop funneling users into partisan political groups, or its now years-long failure to cease selling local political ads in Washington State, it seems that even when Facebook declares it really, really wants to keep a certain type of content off its platform, it has a rather difficult time following through.
More confounding, given the company’s technological prowess, is that Facebook’s automated systems often work at cross-purposes with its stated intent to get rid of particular types of content, interactions, and ads. Darek Ball, who manages the city council campaign of Talauna Reed in Olympia, Washington State’s capital, told Wild West he’s successfully purchased numerous Facebook ads for his candidate since April and had no idea the ads are officially banned by Facebook.
“That doesn’t appear to be their actual policy,” Ball said, “because they offer it to us. They advertise to us daily, encouraging us to boost our pages and to buy ads. Daily.”
Before buying any political ads, Ball said, he went through Facebook’s verification process (beefed up considerably since 2016, when Russians were allowed to purchase Facebook ads targeting the US presidential election). At Facebook’s request, Ball sent over the campaign’s tax filings. He also sent Facebook a copy of his own Washington State driver’s license, which presumably would have suggested to the company that he might be interested in purchasing Washington State political ads.
“If they are saying they’re not running political ads in Washington,” Ball said, “they’re not stopping people.” In any case, Ball finds it hard to imagine his intent wasn’t clear to Facebook. “I don’t know how they wouldn’t know,” he said. “Every time you place a Facebook ad, it can take anything from a couple hours to 24 hours to get them approved. Maybe it’s an algorithm looking, or maybe it’s a person looking, but Facebook gives you a box to tick that says it’s a political ad and I’ve ticked the box.”
Campaigns in other parts of the state are being sold Facebook ads, too. They include candidates for city council in Spokane, Yakima, Walla Walla, and Renton; a school board candidate on Mercer Island; and a campaign on behalf of a controversial ballot measure, known as “Compassion Seattle,” that seeks to redirect the homelessness strategy of the state’s largest city.
With Washington State’s primary elections still two weeks away, and with more than four months yet to go before the November general election, the total spent on these Facebook ads isn’t huge. According to filings with the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission and Facebook’s own online ad library, the combined spend for these local Washington State political ads seems to be somewhere in the low thousands of dollars. Still, that amount will get you a good number of supposedly banned Facebook ads (which is part of why political campaigns like them; they’re cheap). So far, it seems more than 60 different Facebook political ads have been sold to the roughly dozen campaigns since the start of the year. Several of those ads are still live as of this writing, with the potential to create the kind of confusion and problems that state election regulators have publicly worried about in the past.
Those same election regulators have also said, repeatedly, that there’s nothing wrong with local campaigns buying Facebook ads if Facebook, despite its ban, is selling them. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who’s once again suing Facebook over its failure to make required disclosures about the Washington State political ads it sells, has tried to emphasize that Facebook is the one choosing to ban these ads. No one is forcing the company to prohibit local ads in Washington State, and Facebook has another obvious choice available: it could decide to follow state campaign finance law and be sufficiently transparent about the financing and reach of any local Washington State political ads it sells.
Facebook, for its part, has made clear that its ban exists to help the company avoid Washington State’s uniquely strong digital ad transparency requirements. The company’s lawyers are presently asking a Seattle judge to strike down Washington’s “onerous” disclosure system, alleging it violates Facebook’s First Amendment rights.
With Attorney General Ferguson’s case against Facebook slowly rolling forward, and with Facebook’s sales of supposedly banned political ads continuing, I decided to try to get a handle on the full scope of the company’s ongoing ad sales. Last Monday, July 12, I sent Facebook a request for all the data Washington State requires the company to disclose about all the local political ads Facebook has sold to Washington State’s candidates, campaigns, and ballot measure advocates since January 1, 2021.
Facebook says it’s working on my request, which is a change from its refusal to respond directly to similar queries in previous years. But Facebook is already well past the 24-hour window state rules give it for making such information available to “any person” who asks. And along the way, Facebook has sent some interesting requests of its own.
After years of wrangling with state officials, Facebook now has an official email address—WashingtonPoliticalAds@fb.com—for people to use when seeking information about the company’s political ads in Washington State. When I submitted my request to this email address on July 12, I received an automated reply asking me to “please note Facebook does not permit advertising regarding Washington’s state or local elected officials, candidates, elections or ballot initiatives.”
Noted. The email also stated that if Washington State political ads are, in fact, running on Facebook “in violation of this policy,” then “much of the information you are looking for can likely be found in the Ad Library and Ad Library Report.”
For years, however, a major issue between Washington State regulators and Facebook has been that the company’s Ad Library and Ad Library Report do not provide all the information state law requires Facebook to disclose about local political ads. For example, Facebook’s online ad archives only disclose a broad range when it comes to the amount of money spent on each ad. The number of impressions each ad has received also gets displayed as a range. State rules, however, require Facebook to disclose the total amount spent on each ad and the total number of impressions received.
Facebook’s online ad archives also give only minimal information about how each ad was targeted. The ability to finely target Facebook ads at specific groups or lists of people is another part of what makes them so desirable (and so hard to track, since they can be so finely targeted that most people never see them). Because of this, Washington State rules require Facebook to disclose “a description of the demographic information (e.g., age, gender, race, location, etc.) of the audiences targeted and reached, to the extent such information is collected by the commercial advertiser as part of its regular course of business.”
In the automated email I received back from Facebook, I was told that if I wanted “additional information regarding political advertising in Washington that is not available in the Ad Library or Ad Library Report”—in other words, information Washington State requires Facebook to disclose but that Facebook’s online ad archives don’t deliver—”we will send you a form that you can fill out.”
I asked for the form and received the document shown above. It requests that I tell Facebook whether I’m a resident of Washington State, even though there’s no requirement in Washington State law or rules that a person must reside in Washington in order to request local political ad data from companies like Facebook. In fact, state rules specifically say “any person” has a right to such data.
This makes sense. Perhaps a researcher at a university outside of Washington State might someday seek to use the state’s political ad disclosure system to gather information for academic purposes. Perhaps a journalist in New York, D.C., Miami, or even Jakarta someday decides to cover a story involving local political ads in Washington State. Perhaps one of the many national campaign finance watchdog groups based outside of Washington State someday wants to conduct a thorough survey of local political ad spending. Or perhaps a losing candidate moves out of state after their defeat, but still wants to audit the Facebook ad buys that contributed to their loss. A residency requirement could block any of these efforts, and Facebook’s form makes it seem as if such a requirement may exist when, in fact, it does not.
I declined to fill out the residency portion of the form and explained why. I also declined to give Facebook “the URL of Facebook Page requested.” This ask from Facebook flips the disclosure burden on its head, making it the responsibility of the requester to provide a link to every ad or advertiser they’re approaching Facebook about.
What if the ad scrolled by quickly and the requester only remembers the name of the campaign or candidate? What if the requester only has a partial screen shot of an ad but not a URL? What if the requester is very familiar with all of the ad’s details but can’t find the ad in Facebook’s online ad library, a not unusual occurrence? Or what if, like me, the requester is asking for all of the ads Facebook sold targeting local elections in Washington State since the beginning of this year, and is asking this question precisely because they don’t know what each and every one of those ads might have been, and because they assume Facebook, which tracks its ads well enough to charge money for them, should know the answer?
For the URL question on Facebook’s form, I wrote: “Washington State’s laws and rules do not require me to know in advance the entire universe of ads or advertisers that may be responsive to my request.”
Yet even though I only partially filled out Facebook’s form, a lawyer for the company wrote me to say Facebook is “working to fulfill” my request. I’ll report back on what happens and share anything interesting I’m able learn about the money and targeting choices behind the latest Washington State political ad sales on Facebook.
For now, though, it appears that Facebook, with this invented form, is at the very least engaged in some next level self-regulation. The company thinks Washington State’s disclosure requirements are “onerous” and unconstitutional, but if you ask Facebook to abide by those requirements and provide you with certain political ad data you’re legally entitled to see, it will add its own additional items to the “onerous” requirements via this invented form and then, if you ignore some of the form’s manufactured implications, Facebook will waive a number of the form’s implied requirements and—maybe, we’ll see what happens—fulfill your request.
What a world.
Some of the stories I’ve been reading lately:
• “Inside Facebook’s Data Wars” — Kevin Roose exposes an internal Facebook fight over whether transparency about its best-performing posts should be designed to get people useful information or push a pre-determined, pro-Facebook narrative.
• “70 Antitrust Probes” — The Information tallies the legal threats to Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.
• A Different Bargain Than You Went In For — “Retail stores are packed with unchecked facial recognition,” reports The Verge.
• And in Politico, a story that dives into the Washington State fight over digital privacy that Wild West touched on earlier this year:
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