Advertising

The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook in 2016 tried on quite an array of disguises. There was “Defend the 2nd,” a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page for gay rights activists, “LGBT United.” There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.

Federal investigators and officials at Facebook now believe these groups and their pages were part of a highly coordinated disinformation campaign linked to the Internet Research Agency, a secretive company in St. Petersburg, Russia, known for spreading Kremlin-linked propaganda and fake news across the web. Under intensifying pressure from Congress and growing public outcry, Facebook on Oct 2 turned over more than 3,000 of the Russia-linked advertisements from its site over to the Senate and House intelligence committees. The material is part of an attempt to learn the depth of what investigators now believe was a sprawling foreign effort spanning years to interfere with the 2016 United States presidential election.

T-Mobile USA has agreed to stop claiming its 4G LTE network is faster than Verizon Wireless', after the advertising industry's self-regulation body agreed with Verizon that T-Mobile's claim was unsupported. The National Advertising Division (NAD) "recommended T-Mobile discontinue claims that it has the fastest 4G LTE network" and "also recommended that T-Mobile discontinue claims that its LTE network is 'newer' than Verizon's and that Verizon's LTE network is 'older,'" the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council said. T-Mobile agreed to comply with the NAD's recommendations.

For decades, advertisers have striven to stay away from any topic that might prove controversial or divisive. Times have changed.

The responsibility of companies, particularly advertisers, to advocate on social issues and to provide a moral compass in a fraught political environment came up repeatedly during Advertising Week New York, an annual industry conference in Manhattan. To be sure, advertising is not traditionally seen as a moral arbiter, but American companies are in a new postelection era, when advocating for diversity can be seen as a political statement.

Rep Robin Kelly (D-IL), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, is pushing Facebook to strengthen its advertising standards after Russian operatives used the company’s ad service to attack groups like Black Lives Matter during the 2016 elections. In a letter sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Rep Robin Kelly pressed the company to “ensure that discriminatory and tactically divisive ad-targeting is aggressively prevented.” The Illinois Democrat pointed to Russian-linked Facebook pages that promoted “incendiary anti-immigrant rallies, targeted the Black Lives Matter movement and focused attentions on critical election swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan.” “It is my belief that Facebook cannot be the Trojan horse through which America’s vulnerabilities are exploited,” Kelly continued.

As Facebook sought to polish its reputation, industry leaders were wrestling with the misuse of marketing tools that had been developed for their benefit.

Facebook is seen as an unavoidable force, not only because it’s the second-biggest seller of online advertising after Google, but also because it provides companies with unprecedented methods for targeting ads to people based on their tastes and habits.

“Sometimes our industry gets so enamored with new things that we lose sight of unintended consequences,” said Sarah Hofstetter, chief executive of the ad agency 360i. “Data and personalization is one of those things. It can be used for phenomenal targeting of potential consumers to buy cookies, toys and book hotel rooms, but it also can be used to target hate groups and inspire nefarious outcomes.” She added, “Whether they like it or not, media companies have a tremendous responsibility to protect the public from itself.”

But while the social concerns over such misuse are clear, brands are not responding by changing the way they spend their advertising budgets, as they did when ads for brands like AT&T were discovered on YouTube videos promoting terrorism and hate speech.

For a sense of the dilemma confronting Facebook over its ad-targeting system, consider the following word: confederate. As of Sept 27, any prospective advertiser who typed that word into Facebook’s ad-targeting engine would be prompted to distribute their ad to a potential audience of more than four million users who had indicated an interest in the Confederate States of America.

The social network recently grappled with revelations that advertisers were able to target Facebook users who used terms like “Jew hater” to describe themselves. But even after the company took steps to shut down those clearly offensive categories, other targeting terms remain that fall into a gray area. That includes categories like Confederate States, which are legitimate in principle but can be potentially problematic or misused in practice. It illustrates the blurry lines and policing challenge that confront Facebook in its ad targeting. And after a year in which the social network has accepted more responsibility to crack down on false or offensive material, and last week, when the company twice announced new measures to prevent abuses by advertisers, some experts said the scale of that challenge is only starting to become apparent.

How much can Facebook tell us about what really happened when it comes to Russian sabotage of the 2016 election? Senate Intelligence Committee Co-Chair Mark Warner (D-VA), who is investigating Russian election interference, has been arguing lately that Facebook needs to come clean. It needs to publicly disclose the full scope and scale of how Russian entities used its social networking platform to spread fake news and propaganda in order to sow divisions among American voters and influence the outcome of the presidential election. We don’t know who paid for the ads on Facebook and, crucially, how and why the purchasers targeted certain Facebook users to see them in their feeds, and whether they worked with anyone in the United States to develop those lists of targets.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced recently that the social network would begin voluntarily requiring disclaimers on political ads that appear on the site. But in 2011 Facebook went to federal regulators to get an exception from a rule that would have forced it to do the same thing.

Federal election regulations state that political "communications placed for a fee on another person's website" must carry disclaimers stating that they are advertisements and who paid for them. Facebook sought an exception to disclaimer regulations citing space constraints for its "character-limited ads." Lawyers for the company argued the ads were so small that a disclaimer would be impracticable. Facebook argued, at the time, that ads on the platform were restricted to 160 characters. However, ads on Facebook have since evolved into sophisticated multimedia experiences. Advertisers can choose to sponsor videos, carousels of images and slideshows. Today, not all of Facebook's advertising options are character-limited.

Google has started overhauling millions of search results in Europe—and neither the search giant nor its detractors are happy about it.

Google is allowing rival shopping-comparison services to bid for and resell advertising space at the very top of Google search results in Europe. The new ads appear alongside similar product ads from Google’s own shopping-ad unit, which Google said is bidding independently in the same auctions. The changes are part of Google’s effort to comply with a European Union antitrust decision that fined the company 2.42 billion euros ($2.71 billion) for using its dominant search engine to favor its own shopping ads at the expense of competitors’ -- and ordered it to start treating itself the same as its competitors. Google is appealing the decision, but is implementing its order to avoid noncompliance fines that can reach total 5% of its global daily revenue, or more than $12 million.

Officials at the Federal Election Commission are reaching out to political ad buyers, among others, to solicit more comments about potential new disclosure rules. At this point, most of the FEC's efforts are around gathering ideas about ways to modernize outdated disclosure laws. Within the FEC and on Capitol Hill, a few other ideas expected to be considered (they're still very far off from actual implementation): Requiring all online political ads to carry disclosures; Creating a database of all political ads; Banning programmatic (automated) political ads from being sold. It will be hard for the six-person commission, usually divided equally among party lines, to come to a consensus around this, according to sources within the FEC, meaning that any major disclosure efforts would have to come from Congress.