Sen. Mark Warner urges social media platforms to reinforce efforts against political abuse ahead of election

WASHINGTON (WAVY) — Sen. Mark Warner urged Facebook, Twitter, and Google to help raise accountability and transparency ahead of Election Day.

The move from Sen. Warner to highlight the spread of disinformation, viral misinformation, and voter suppression efforts on social media including the said platforms.

In his letter to Facebook, Sen. Warner criticized the platform’s efforts to label manipulated or synthetic content, describing these as “wholly inadequate.” He also raised alarm with instances of Facebook’s amplification of harmful content.

Sen. Warner tells Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg that “Facebook has repeatedly failed to ensure that its existing policies on political advertising are being enforced.”

“Facebook has long been accused of facilitating divisive advertisements from dark money groups. A recent report by Avaaz revealed that despite Facebook’s claims to prohibit false and misleading information in ads by outside political groups, it allowed hundreds of such ads in key swing states earlier this month to be run by super PACs. And despite your personal pledge to stamp out voter suppression efforts on Facebook, a recent report by ProPublica revealed that voting misinformation continues to flourish on Facebook”

Similarly, in a letter to Google, Sen. Warner raised concern with the company’s efforts to combat harmful misinformation – particularly disinformation about voting, spread by right-leaning YouTube channels. He also criticized the comprehensiveness of Google’s ad archive, which presently excludes issue ads.

In his letter to Twitter, which has banned paid political content and placed restrictions on cause-based advertising, Sen. Warner noted that doctored political content continues to spread organically without adequate labeling that slows its spread or contextualizes it for users.

In all three letters, Sen. Warner urged the companies to reinforce their efforts against abuse of paid and organic content policies, and to more aggressively identify, label, and remove manipulated or synthetic media to prevent efforts to amplify disinformation by Russia and other bad actors, both foreign and domestic.

The Honest Ads Act is a bipartisan legislation aimed to help prevent foreign interference in elections and improve the transparency of online political advertisements. It would safeguard the integrity of American democracy by requiring large online platforms to maintain public records of advertisers who purchase political ads

Under the Honest Ads Act, it would:

Amend the definition of ‘electioneering communication’ in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, to include paid internet and digital advertisements.
Require digital platforms with at least 50,000,000 monthly visitors to maintain a public file of all electioneering communications purchased by a person or group who spends more than $500.00 total on ads published on their platform. This file would contain a digital copy of the advertisement, a description of the audience the advertisement targets, the number of views generated, the dates and times of publication, the rates charged, and the contact information of the purchaser.
Require online platforms to make all reasonable efforts to ensure that foreign individuals and entities are not purchasing political advertisements in order to influence the American electorate.