Combating Election Disinformation
By Elizabeth Allendorf and Matthew Volk, with support from Matt Sievers and Cecilia Donnelly Krum
Every day, tens of millions of Americans view political advertisements on social media that are disguised as unpaid content, also known as “dark ads.” According to researchers from New York University, between May 2018 and June 2019, more than half of Facebook pages that displayed U.S. political ads concealed the identities of their backers. The $1.1 billion spent on political ads on Facebook in that period makes plain that some political organizations are eager to sway the public’s vote without disclosing that they are paying for advertising. This policy brief proposes two solutions: a series of actions that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could take to make online political ads more transparent and a game that educates potential voters about dark ads.
This brief was completed as part of a project for the 2020 Aspen Tech Policy Hub Fellowship, a program designed to teach technology experts how to impact policy.
