Russia has long used social media to launch disinformation campaigns to sway the American public during elections.
While some social media companies have worked to prevent the spread of questionable content, Russia seems to have found a new, perfectly legal way in: influencers.
The Justice Department on Wednesday filed conspiracy charges against two Russian nationals who Attorney General Merrick Garland said engaged in a “$10 million scheme to create and distribute content to US audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” He called it a Russian attempt to “exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts.”
Daniel Weiner, the Elections and Government Program director at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Business Insider the case demonstrates a “huge gap” in political advertising rules.
The Federal Elections Commission requires clear ad disclaimers on broadcast, newspaper, and internet content detailing who paid for the ad. But the rules don’t extend to paid influencers. In January, the Brennan Center sent a legal letter to the FEC asking it to add disclosure requirements for when candidates pay influencers for their online support.
“It illustrates the potency of influencers and other more novel methods of political communication as tools for foreign interference in the electoral process,” Weiner told Business Insider.
The two plaintiffs, both employees at RT, a Russian media organization, attempted to “influence the American public by secretly planting and financing a content creation company on US soil,” which posted videos on X, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, according to the Justice Department.
The company in question is Tenet Media. The Justice Department didn’t name the company in its filing, but there were enough details for anyone paying attention to figure it out. The Tennessee-based group publishes content from podcasters and influencers like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, who said they did not know about Tenet’s ties to Russian funding. Garland confirmed in a press conference that Tenet did not disclose those ties to its influencers.
While there are disclosure requirements for online political ads, they mostly apply “to those traditional pop-up ads that you would see that were prevalent 10 years ago or so,” Weiner said.
“For influencers and for other really novel forms of communication, there’s really almost no transparency, and that’s a problem. There’s no real transparency via regulation, and there’s limited-to-no transparency even in terms of the voluntary rules that major online platforms have adopted,” he said.
Social media platforms have adopted advertising libraries to increase ad transparency. Meta, for example, adopted an ad library that “includes all active and public branded content that’s shown on Facebook and Instagram with a paid partnership label,” according to its website.
But such databases, Weiner said, generally apply only to traditional requests to purchase advertising.
“If, instead, you pay an influencer who’s active on a site, there’s no way necessarily for the platform to know that that person was being paid,” Weiner said, noting the Federal Trade Commission requires influencers to disclose if brands are paying them to promote products. “But, generally, even there, that mostly applies to commercial transactions. There’s really nothing when you’re talking about influencers paid for political purposes.”
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