 Thank you, everyone, for joining us online. I am Jen Daskel. I am a professor and faculty director of a new tech law and security program at American University Washington College of Law. And I'd like to welcome you to the latest installment of our free speech project, Moved Online. This has been a year long joint project between our tech law and security program and Future Tents, a collaboration of Slate, New America, and ASU. Over the course of this year, we are tackling a range of issues dealing with the ways in which online communications are challenging our notions of and commitments to free speech. We had planned a longer in-person discussion about political ads, and we are instead breaking that up into shorter online one-hour segments. And this is the first one where we are going to be talking about what we can learn from regulation of ads on broadcast TV to the online environment. We have, as is apparent, a really amazing group. Two panelists, Commissioner Ellen Weintraub and Rick Kaplan. Commissioner Weintraub is the commissioner on the federal election commission, where she served since 2002. And she's been a chair for three times. Her latest appointment as a chair began in 2019. Prior to her appointment at the federal election commission, she was of counsel to the political law group of Perkins and Cooley, and she was at counsel at the House Ethics Committee. Rick Kaplan is the general counsel and executive vice president of legal and regulatory affairs at the National Association of Broadcasters. He joined the National Association of Broadcasters in 2012 and was named general counsel in 2014. And he also has served on a number of different roles, including in leadership capacities at the FCC. So I am going to start by turning it to Rick and asking Rick to talk a little bit about the rules on political ad broadcasting. What are the limits? What are the requirements with respect to access, with respect to payment, and disclosure limitation? Sure. And thanks so much. And thanks for having me on this virtual panel. It was open to join you all in person, but glad that we were still able to do this. There are panoply different regulations that apply to over-the-air broadcasters when it comes to political advertising. I'm going to try and touch on some of the outlines, the contours, that hopefully will give us some basis for the conversation that I know folks are interested today. And they can be fairly technical, so I'll try instead of some of the more technical things. But the general rule is that legally qualified candidates, and I'll explain what that means in a minute, for federal office, are entitled to reasonable access to use broadcast facilities. And broadcasters must provide equal opportunities to all opposing candidates for the same office. In addition, during specific periods preceding an election, which is what we refer to as the political window, candidates are entitled to the lowest advertising rate. And I'll put a little meat on the bones in that in a second. A legally qualified candidate is one who announced publicly an intention to run for public office and is also qualified to hold that office. Now, only federal candidates actually have a right of reasonable access to use of stations facilities. Interesting that Congress put that in there. Now, stations are not required to sell time to state and local candidates, but if they do, then the rules for equal time and sponsor identification, no censorship and lowest unit rate do apply. Equal times an interesting one that many people know about, which is that a station must provide equal time to opponents of a candidate that uses the station upon request. And that equal time must be given within seven days. So you will occasionally hear about this as we get closer to the presidential election. You'll see examples of somebody appeared on say Saturday Night Live or something like that was does that one candidate did? Does that mean the other one gets equal time on the network? So those things frequently come up. Lowest unit rate, you may be wondering a little bit what that is. You may not be familiar. And this is quite a big development over the last couple of decades, but 45 days before primary or 60 days before a general election, stations must charge candidates what's called the lowest rate charged to any other advertiser for the same kind of time. And what that means is, if it's something in the middle of the night, it's obviously different than something in the middle of the day. And so, but you have to give them the lowest unit charge. But that's only, now we're talking about candidate ads and as we move through this panel discussion, you'll see there's a stark difference between candidate ads, those sponsored by a candidate and issue ads, which are sponsored by third parties. So the lowest unit charge only relates to candidate ads. A couple of other quick things important to know, I think as we discuss the things today that we're gonna address, federal candidates must certify whether or not the ad refers to an opponent. And if so, it must state in the ad that she or he has approved the ad. The ad must also state that it is quote unquote paid for or sponsored by the entity paying for the spot. And a lot of you are familiar with seeing that in the ads you watch on TV. One last thing to point out too, that's unique here for broadcasters is that stations must maintain what's called a political file. And that's now online. It used to be just kept at the station, but now it's online for anyone to see if you go to the FCC website or station websites have them too, links to them as well. And these political files allow the public to obtain information about political ads and to enable candidates to avail themselves of equal time. So in other words, and this was the original theory behind political ads is that if I'm running for office and I'm checking on the stations in my state in the Senate campaign and I can then see, oh, my candidate actually ran a bunch of ads on this station, it gives me an opportunity to do that. It also gives me an opportunity to demand equal time if we see they're on there. So, and the required information is actually pretty substantial includes the rates charged, when that ad aired, relevant candidate and office sought, the treasurer of the campaign committee, and whether the ad communicates a message related to, again, this is a term of art, any political matter of national importance. The all-ins, I'll just wrap this up here, all these regulations and there are more, but these are kind of the nuts and bolts. You know, the challenge as we look at all these regulations is that broadcasters are under a lot of pressure here, that one sort of practical problem is broadcasters are subject to enforcement for violations, but collection of the required information from candidates can be outside our control. So, if you think about it, the ad agency provides a broadcaster with the information, and so that's one major step, you know, and the FCC which regulates these, and again, to be about to be clear here, especially with the commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, so between the SEC, the FCC and the FEC, it's all confusing, but the Federal Communications Commission regulates this, and so they don't regulate advertisers though, they regulate broadcasters, we hold the licenses, so that's, so we are ultimately responsible, even though we often don't have access to the information, and the other thing that's critical here too is the timing, stations have to upload disclosure within, typically within 24 hours of the ad being placed, so that's obviously it's a fast moving cycle, and you can imagine when you get closer to an election, that's pretty action-packed. Okay, so you've just described a fair number of rules, you've talked about rules requiring equal access, you've talked about rules setting limits on how much can be charged, and you've talked about rules requiring disclosure of candidate ads. Commissioner Wintrep, how does that compare to the world of online political advertising? What rules are in play there? Well, I wanna start out, first of all, thank you for having me. I wanna start out by saying that what the FEC does and what the FCC does, there's some overlap, but there's also a lot of differences. We are primarily a disclosure agency, we are all about money and politics, so our primary mission is to make sure that all of the candidates and the political parties and the PACs and the super PACs, that they are all disclosing to the American people how much money they are spending and what they're spending it on. So to the extent that those players are spending money on online ads, that should show up in their regular disclosure reports if they are regular reporting entities. But there are other folks that run ads that are not regular reporting entities, they are not political committees, and they still may have disclosure requirements that they're spending enough money on advertising. And that comes up in two separate buckets. There's what we call independent expenditures, which are ads that are directly advocating that somebody vote for or against a candidate. And then there's what we call electioneering communications. Electioneering communications are ads that are run within proximity to an election. We have our own set of time windows, everybody's got time windows. So ads that are run within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election that are targeted to the electorate for that particular candidate and just mention the candidate's name. They don't have to urge a vote for or against that candidate. All they have to do is mention the candidate's name and then that falls into the electioneering communications bucket, which has its own disclosure requirements and disclaimer requirements. So the reason why that's important and significant in the online context is that any ad that that is run by a political committee online has to have information about who's paying for it. And as I said, if they are a regular political committee, they will be disclosing the money side of it in their regular reports to the FEC. But if it is an electioneering communication, then all right, let me back up. If a group, other than a political committee is running an independent expenditure is urging a vote directly for or against a candidate, that's got to have the disclaimer requirements on it. And they have certain reporting requirements to the commission. If it is an electioneering communication, however, that is defined as an ad that is run on broadcast satellite or cable. So if the ad does not directly advocate for or against a candidate and they're not soliciting money, they're not soliciting political contributions and it's not run by a political committee, then there's not a lot that we can do about that. That really does not fall. There are not a lot of requirements that are associated with that. And that is the problem that, since most ads actually are more likely to fall into that bucket, you don't really need to say vote for the candidate in order to convey the message that you want somebody to vote for the candidate or the contrary to vote against that candidate. And particularly the outside spending groups who are the least likely to have the regular reporting requirements, they often will run the negative ads. The ones that are just, boy, this is really a terrible person. They don't need to say, don't vote for that person. That's why we have this category of electioneering communications. And that is what the Honest Ads Act is trying to correct for is to bring the internet ads that are talking about candidates in proximity to an election under the same reporting regime as broadcast cable and satellite ads. Right, so the Honest Ads Act, just to back up for a second, the Honest Ads Act, as probably everybody on this webinar knows, but just in case, is sponsored by a bipartisan piece of legislation in both the House and the Senate. And the Senate side, it's sponsored by Senators Klobuchar, Warner and Graham. And then as I said, there's also a bipartisan bill in the House. And they've described this bill as, and I'm quoting from language in press releases, ensuring that political ads sold online are covered by the same rules as ads sold on TV, radio and satellite. Commissioner Wendtrop, is that an accurate description of what the Honest Ads Act does? And is that even possible? Is it possible to hold online communications to the same standards as broadcast communications? I don't know, why not? And I do think it's an accurate description. What it technically does, as I said, is expands the definition of election hearing communications to include online ads in addition to broadcast cable and satellite. And one really notable distinction is that we don't have beyond what's in the FCC Act, we don't have in the Federal Election Campaign Act a requirement for maintaining this kind of a public file. They handle the public file of the actual database of ads, we don't have that function. And what the Honest Ads Act would do is require platforms, the larger platforms, to maintain a file of all of these ads, which right now there is no such requirement in contrast to the ads that people run on broadcast. And I think that's really important. Some of the platforms are doing that on a voluntary basis, but I think it would be really better for everyone to all be on the same playing field. Everybody have the same set of requirements, no matter which platform you're talking about and for there to be a uniform set of requirements on that. That sounds pretty reasonable. Why is there, I know you're not a proponent or you're not in the position, you're not advocating for the Honest Ads Act, but what's the basis for the opposition to the Honest Ads Act then? Unfortunately, anything that smacks of campaign finance reform gets some people's backs up and they say, no, no, we don't wanna do that. And unfortunately, it has become a pretty partisan issue where it's just, right now it's almost impossible to get anything that in any way touches on campaign finance legislation through the Senate. It's just not going anywhere. Unless it's despite the fact that it has bipartisan support. So Rick, back to you for a second. And the Honest Ads Act is based largely in the presumption that the broadcast rules got it right and they should be applied to the online environment. Is that, do you agree with that? And what's missing? What do we do about, so far we've been talking about ads that either are for or against particular candidates or mentioned candidates by names, but does the Honest Ads Act help us with issue ads or what should we be doing about issue ads as well? So, I think the Honest Ads Act is a template that as the commissioner said, apply more broadly the rules that exist for broadcasters. When we think through these issues, we generally have three kind of lenses through which we look at them. And first, for broadcasters, this is very specific to us. We become concerned with having to comply with two different regimes. Any, we've seen these, but this, by the way, is something at the state level too. You're seeing more state level laws come up of this sort. In fact, one was recently struck down in Maryland and Maryland is trying to do it again to come up with a new formula that meets the First Amendment. But we're, broadcasters are often worried about complying with FCC rules and then having a different one for their online entity. So in other words, a broadcaster will have its station but the station has a website. And then if you have two different regimes that gets somewhat difficult. You know, second, we don't typically seek to add regulations for others. So, you know, oh, we have to do it. They have to do it. But as the commissioner said, I think a level playing field does make sense. It's something that's, you know, I think is, and we see where the sponsors of the bill are coming from in that regard. And third, you know, we do worry in one of the tough things for platforms, in this case, broadcasters, but I think this would apply universally is the very difficult piece of who is responsible for getting the information. The FCC has struck a balance where there's certain things that like with issue ads, as you mentioned with issue ads, broadcasters now need to at least ask the question and try to get the information. But if we were trying to and responsible for getting all of the information and if we ran into some walls, what that means, we don't have access to it. So, you know, there is an enforcement issue here, which is quite complicated because, you know, perhaps it's the advertisers, you know, the ones that should be regulated here, but there's no natural fit for where that would go. So it's somewhat complicated. The other thing, as I mentioned before, is with the Honest Ads Act, I should say, you know, we certainly appreciate and support transparency in what the act is trying to accomplish. There's a lot about the idea behind the act that makes a lot of sense, but get where it's coming from. The rationale, as I mentioned before, and this is something I think we need to grapple with, has shifted it over time, kind of morphed as to what political advertising and disclosure is for. Again, it used to be for, and when this all started, was equal opportunity rights. Then over time, you know, it sort of became, you know, more about getting to find out who's behind the money. And then, you know, I'm not sure that's best left with broadcasters or even social media, but first it's because someone has to go through all that information. You know, maybe it is better through the FEC or something like that, to have the folks doing the ads who are the ones responsible for providing the information so you can get the transparency, the Honest Ads Act is looking for. Let's turn to this question of issue ads. It's not been raised a few different times. First, before we even start talking about how we think about regulating issue ads, how do we define them? What's, how would you define an issue ad? That's the $100,000 question. It, you know, so issue advertising applies to ballot issues or ads that involve controversial issues of public importance. And if you can define that for me, I'd be very excited, because we struggle with this one all the time. But it's ads about elections, but ones that are not, these are ads that are not sponsored by candidates or their official committees. So for folks who are, you know, not super involved in this, it's the ads you see, you know, from PAC, Super PACs, things like that. Those are issue advertisements that are not sponsored by the candidate. And so those ads have slightly different regulations. So for example, broadcasters, now in the FCC recently clarified this, have to put in our public file, any, and I say public file should be clear for those not up on the FCC. The public file is a broader file that includes the political file where we address putting these things. So in our political file, we have to put in, if there are ads of national import, if there are issue ads that cover areas of national importance, that we have to include those and list all of the issues to the best of our ability in those ads. So an ad might be simple and just be about healthcare from a national debate or a PAC may sponsor an ad that covers three, four or five issues. And again, we need to list all of those issues to the best of our ability when we put that in the public file. So that folks looking at it can tell what the ad was about. Let me just say that from the FEC perspective that issue ads, it's sort of not defined by what it is so much as what it isn't. It's not a direct advocacy ad. It's supposedly an ad that talks about issues and therefore should be less regulated than an ad that talks directly about candidates and who you should vote for. But there have been many, many ads that were run by folks who said they were issue ads where the issue turned out to be the character qualifications and fitness for office of a particular candidate. And this is where we've got the whole concept of electioneering communications because Congress became convinced that there were many, many ads out there that stopped short of express advocacy and yet were pretty plainly about the election and that the public deserved information about this. That's the other side of this that I think is important to emphasize and that the Supreme Court has emphasized in upholding various disclosure laws that the electorate, the American public has a right to know who is behind the advertising that is going on about candidates and who's trying to influence their votes. And it is really significant and important to an informed electorate. It's hard to have an informed electorate if that kind of information is not out there. Right now, over the last number of years, we've been seeing a real migration of political advertising to the internet. We're now seeing billions of dollars being spent online on political advertising. So to leave that category of advertising out of the equation really would leave the American electorate very short changed in terms of the information that they have. And Jennifer, I should add to what the commissioner said because one thing you had asked was these ads actually, and it's important when you have the distinction you're making between candidate issue ads are actually quite important for people to understand how this all works because they're not subject to the same rules of the FCC as candidate ads. So for example, an issue ad is not entitled to reasonable access. It's not entitled to equal, it wouldn't entitle someone to equal time. So that used to, there's something called the fairness doctrine. I think many people are familiar with it if you've covered one side of an issue you don't have to cover the other side of the issue but that's not the case anymore. Also it's not importantly when we talk about money it's not subject to the lowest unit rate as well. So that's for candidate ads but not for issue ads. Another interesting thing I think people will find this interesting at least is that whereas you can't do this in candidate ads stations can censor third party ads. So this is, you see the controversy is bubble up over times about ads that kind of shocked certain people and they thought the station may not run it. We always see this running up to an election for issue as they can be censored. The commissioner, I want to pick up on this a little bit and go a little further. So we saw, this is obviously became a big issue in the wake of Twitter's announcement that it was going to ban all political ads. And whenever one thinks about that the reality was that after that Twitter struggled to define what counts as a political ad. And they weren't just limited to a definition of election, electioneering communication because that was about a particular candidate but they were looking at again when you start talking about issues of national importance. How do you go about defining that and should that be something, should there be a role for that we see in helping companies have a standard definition? How do we think about the full range of ads that ought to be regulated particularly when as you point out a lot of advertising is happening online and a lot of influence operations are happening online that don't necessarily even mention a political candidate by name? Yes, I think that that raises a really difficult issue. And let me say that this whole concept of ads on issues of national importance that doesn't come out of what we regulate. The FEC doesn't get into that kind of content regulation. But I understand and as I said the way around that in the Federal Election Campaign Act is to look at the ads that talk about candidates within proximity to an election as concept of electioneering communications which some people in the campaign finance world probably would define as issue ads. And they might be or they might not be, they might be more direct candidate ads. But I do think that we have seen a lot of influence operations and the most disturbing ones coming from foreign countries. We saw that in 2016 and the range of intelligence agencies a few months ago came out with a statement warning Americans that they were expecting to see more of that in this election cycle. From Russia, from China, from Iran. I'm very concerned right now about misinformation and disinformation that sort of overlays health issues around the coronavirus with electoral issues because plainly this is going to be a big issue in the election. And it's really important that people get accurate information about health information and about what their government is and isn't doing about that, what the federal government is doing, what the state governments are doing. So this raises really not only questions of the health of our democracy but also the health of our citizens and in some cases could be life or death issues. Now, having said all that, the FEC is not situated and has never sought the ability to or the authority to try and regulate sort of truth in advertising to try and tell people whether ads were true or false or to comment on them in that way. But I do think the platforms have taken at least some steps towards some set of issues that they're willing to weigh in on and try and promote more accurate information or at least inform people when the information is not accurate. And that is something that I think everyone really ought to be paying a very close attention to how they go about doing that because it's gonna vary from one platform to another. And I don't think any of them are gonna be able to really take a hands-off attitude on this. And let's face it, they're not neutral pipelines. They're not just sort of transmitting information. They have algorithms. They're promoting some messages and demoting other messages and they have some responsibility, I think in this information environment for taking some set steps to ensure that people are getting accurate information. So I wanna pick up on this question of foreign influence and obviously, foreigners cannot buy ads advocating for against candidates or political parties. Well, they're not supposed to. They're not supposed to. But there's not an equivalent bar on foreigners buying issue ads. So Rick, I'm wondering whether that's something that should be addressed somehow or we ought to be concerned about that kind of influence. And if so, what do we do? It hasn't been a major issue for broadcasters. The whole issue of foreign influence elections has been far more in the context of large social media platforms. And so it's not something that broadcasters typically run into. And actually, even with large social media platforms, the foreign influencers often didn't seem to be focused on perching political ads on those platforms. We're engaging in other ways with other types of content, creating social media web pages using false personas online, things like that. So any regulations applicable to political advertisements may not even reach a significant portion of the foreign-based online activity that is concerned a lot of people. In fact, we saw this come up somewhat in the Maryland law I referenced earlier in the piece that went to district court and then the Fourth Circuit appealed the district court striking down the law. And the court was concerned about applying overly broad, applying the law overly broadly, including to media platforms that were not the source of the concern. So it's something we have to grab. It's certainly an important issue. There's no question. It's not clear. It certainly doesn't really impact broadcasters one way or another much, but for the overall conversation, it's not clear whether political ads is the way to get at the main concern that I've heard voiced. Commissioner, I'm gonna turn the same question back to you, but ask more specifically about one set of policies that at least Facebook has adopted, where they have now been required authentication before buying an ad. And one of the things that's needed in order to authenticate oneself is an ID and some sort of mailing address, which operates as kind of a de facto ban on foreigners buying political ads, which are defined not just as ads for against particular candidates, but also ads on issues of national importance. Is there, is that an approach that makes sense? Is there a risk that we inadvertently keep out legitimate voices and perspectives of foreigners in policy issues, which we may want to hear their voices as well, at the same time that we're trying to deal with concerns about employees? Well, let me say a couple of things. First of all, FEC regulations say that foreign nationals are not allowed to make any kind of disbursements in connection with a US election, federal, state, or local. So that in connection with language is actually pretty broad and could well cover more than express advocacy ads. So I don't, I'm not willing to stipulate that the law as it stands right now only covers express advocacy when it comes to foreign spending. And the leading case on this, interestingly enough, the Blumen case, which was authored by Ben Judge Kavanaugh when he was back on the DC circuit, went in a different direction than a lot of people thought it was going to go in when it came to looking at foreign spending in our elections. He said it didn't implicate the great debates over the First Amendment and campaign finance that we've been having over the last number of decades, but rather went to the definition of our political community. And his opinion is steeped in language about who we want to influence the US government and how it is a legitimate concern to ensure that non-Americans, non-US citizens do not have the same say in how our government works in influencing our elections and the US government itself that US citizens do. So I think that there is indeed some play there, some room for additional statutes and regulation in this area. I don't think that the platforms have gone too far. I mean, they have taken some steps in trying to ensure that it is US citizens who are buying political ads, but at the same time, it's my understanding that Facebook, for example, once they verify that, you can identify yourself any way you want on a Facebook ad. You could say paid for by Mickey Mouse and they're not going to say that that's, oh, we looked at the person's credit card so we know it's not Mickey Mouse. So I think they could actually go further than they already have in ensuring that the American people get the kind of transparency that the Supreme Court has already endorsed in terms of the importance of this information to the electorate. And I do think that this is not in any way a hypothetical concern. I think we are going to see this. I think the platforms could take stronger steps to identify and root out inauthentic content. I don't believe that bots have First Amendment rights. Maybe corporations have First Amendment rights, but I don't think bots have First Amendment rights. So I think that stronger action to take down bots would be constitutional, I believe. And I think we should see better identification of manipulated media. I think there's a lot of concern out there. We're not, I don't think the technology is there quite yet for really persuasive deep fakes, but we're certainly getting there. And there's been a lot of what they call either cheap fakes or shallow fakes that have been going around online. And I would like to see the platforms do a better job of identifying when the media has been manipulated so that people can, again, it goes to whether you can trust what you see. Right, but the transparency and disclosure points are incredibly important. That the earlier part of the conversation, I think again, highlights the difficulties of defining political ads. There is, in my view, there's a difference between the ad that's in connection with an election and an ad that's about any issue of national importance and defining that line and finding appropriate rules and standards that make that distinction and abide by it, I think are incredibly, incredibly difficult. I wanna remind the listeners to please submit questions. We are going to turn to those shortly. Before we do, commissioner, I wanna turn back to you again. You wrote a terrific piece in November in the Washington Post, I commend it to everybody, about the dangers of microtargeting and a response in part to Twitter's decision to just ban off political ads saying, don't ban off political ads and set focus on this other more important problem, which is microtargeting. Can you talk a little bit about your proposal and your concerns that led you to write this piece? Sure, thank you. So my concern about microtargeting is that the platforms, they get all this information about us and we don't even, most users don't even think about how much information about ourselves we are conveying and just kind of handing over to the platforms. Every time we click on something or we share something, we like something, we overlook something, the platforms are just scooping all this data up about us and this is their business model. They use this to target ads exactly to the people who are most going to be susceptible to them. Now, we can debate whether that's a great thing when they're selling soap, but when they're selling ads about candidates, when they're selling political ads, I think it really does raise some serious First Amendment issues. The jurisprudence that we have from the Supreme Court about the First Amendment celebrates the role of a robust debate. And if you don't like what one person is saying, well, you don't wanna take down that speech, you wanna counter that speech by coming up with a better argument on the other side. Microtargeting eliminates that possibility because only this narrow segment of individuals are going to see that individual ad that is hand selected and designed by the AI for you based on what they have already gleaned about you. And none of this is, as I said, sort of a conscious process on the consumer part of just kind of handing all this information over for the purpose of being used as an advertising guinea pig. And if information is being conveyed this way, through microtargeting, particularly now, at a time when everybody is online all the time, you're not gathered around the water cooler these days talking to people about what you read online last night, you're just sitting there staring at your computer screen all day long. And by the way, people should at a safe distance get outside, it's a beautiful day out today in Washington, get some fresh air, don't sit online all day. But it really undermines our notion of how to best promote a wide open and robust debate where everybody can mix it up and the best ideas will triumph in the end if the only people who are seeing the ads are the ones who are susceptible to them and you're not seeing the same ads as your next door neighbor or maybe even the person sitting across from you at the dinner table. So what I suggested was that when it comes to selling political ads, the platform should on their own. I'm not suggesting this as a new regulation that the FEC would adopt, but I am suggesting that the platforms who benefit and have thrived in our democracy from all the protections that they get both from the First Amendment and section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that they should in the interest of protecting the First Amendment, protecting robust debate, protecting our democracy that they should not allow this kind of micro-targeting of political ads and rather make sure that the ads go to a wide enough audience that people can pick them apart, people can see what's being sent to other folks and can raise new arguments against them and that the advertisers themselves be they candidates or third party spenders will be held accountable for the messages that they're putting out. And if I remember correctly, you're the article you wrote, you proposed specific standards that advertisers for political ads could only target one level lower than the level of the election. Yeah, except if you're running a national election, you could go down two levels. So you could, if you're running for Congress, you could go down to the county level for micro-targeting. If you're running for the presidency, you could go down to a congressional district. You wouldn't have to just be limited to the entire nation or an entire state, but to make sure that enough people see the ad that there can be a real response to it if people choose to respond. And the platforms have all chosen different ways of addressing this. The, as you said, Twitter, it's trying to get out of the political advertising business. They didn't have a big political advertising business to begin with, so maybe it wasn't, that was the easiest way for them to handle it. Facebook really, after claiming, they were thinking about it very, very hard for a long time. They said, you know what? No, we're gonna continue to allow micro-targeting and political ads. Google had an approach that was somewhat in between. They said they wouldn't allow micro-targeting below the level of zip code age and gender. So that was the closest to what I had suggested, but it is still a pretty narrow range of people. If you think about, you know, the typical zip code is about 8,000 people. If you divide that again by age and gender, you're gonna be slicing it pretty much thinner than I had proposed. But again, it's the closest to what I had suggested. And so obviously you've identified a real problem that your proposals and these kinds of proposals are trying to solve. How do you respond to the concern that sometimes raise that newcomers to the political people who are trying to enter the market in the first time, small-scale candidates, really benefit from the ability of being able to micro-target because it makes it less expensive for them to reach their intended audience. And if they have to, if they're forced to expend more because they're forced to reach a big audience, it's just gonna make it that much harder for them to actually enter the race and potentially shake things up politically. Well, I mean, small-scale candidates are gonna be running in smaller-scale races, so they won't have to reach as many people. Small-scale candidates aren't usually running national campaigns, so they still wouldn't have to advertise to that many people. And I'd like to say that this is not, I'm glad that I was able to move the debate forward on this issue. I'm not the only person who has suggested this. I'm really smart. People in the tech world have come up with similar proposals, people like Alex Stamos and Yala Eisenstadt, you know, that people that I really respect a lot. And that gives me a lot more confidence that this is not a crazy idea that I came up with. So Rick, I'm gonna turn it back to you, give you a chance to weigh in and thoughts on any of those issues, but also wanted to direct one of our audience questions to you, which was you talked at the beginning about equal time. The question was, can you clarify what you mean by equal time? Is it equal opportunity to buy equivalent time or is it something other than that? Yeah, so equal opportunity. So when I was referring to it earlier, I was, when I started at the very top, I was talking about in the context of political advertising for being able to buy within the political window. And did you react to what the commission was saying? And again, this isn't a broadcaster heavy issue, obviously. So speaking, you know, just for myself, you know, I think it's very provocative, very interesting. You know, Twitter probably went, you know, too far and maybe the commissioner, even we know why because the commissioner, what she's trying to address as something, right, is not a step that far is you don't have to eliminate political advertising, right? So, and the question would then be is the government doing it or companies doing it? If companies do it themselves, certainly, you know, you avoid the first, any first amendment problems and that's, you know, maybe something companies should do. Other things that have been proposed are better ability to block, you know, Facebook talked about that, people complained that it actually wasn't very useful. But there's lots of ways to get at this, but it's, but I think the big point that commissioner raises that's important is that a robust conversation is what we're looking for and things gained, you know, and things further in pursuit of that is what the goal is here. And if there are things that are derailing that, then that's a problem. But micro-targeting, you know, in and of itself, is it a bad thing? I'm not sure. It seems like, you know, there are many cases where that might be important and, you know, there might be less well-funded congressional campaigns who are struggling to get notice, especially early on might wanna make use of it. But it's a slippery slope. Another audience question, I'll turn this one back to you again, Rick, to start and then I'll turn back to you, commissioner, about the question of truth in advertising. How, what's the role, starting with broadcasters, what's the role of broadcasters to make sure that the advertisers are telling the truth and how did that work? Again, very challenging, it's a great question. Broadcasters often end up in the middle of fights between campaigns over, and we see this all the time, right, whether something was truthful or not. When it comes to candidate ads, it's usually, you know, broadcasters are not in a position to be doing detective work to figure out if each and every complaint is not true. However, you know, there are times where broadcasters have asked, hey, you know, this does seem quite questionable. You know, can we have some proof that this is something they said? This was a quote they actually used. But you know, in the fast-moving political scheme, we're not saddled with the responsibility, nor should we be of verifying every claim. At some point that the viewer has to be able to discern right from wrong. But again, if something is brought to a broadcaster's attention, each one's gonna handle it differently. That does strike them as pretty patently false. That's something they will follow up on. And we, this happens quite frequently. Commissioner, to you, and obviously Facebook took a lot of heat when it's refused to back-check political ads. And what should Facebook be back-checking? What should be the role? How would you, how do you do that? And who should be making the determination as to what isn't truthful? Well, you know, I do think this is a challenging question. And everybody says the same thing. Well, I don't wanna be the speech police. I don't wanna be the truth police. I don't want that to be me. And I literally do not want that to be me. I think there would be serious First Amendment problems with the government trying to do that. And then Facebook turns around and says, well, we don't wanna do it either. But on the other hand, they actually do do it for a lot of other things. They sort of routinely do back-checks on a lot of other kinds of advertising and information that is going on their platform. And I think they should, you know, they should take down information that is just blatantly untrue that could potentially harm people. And they will do it in the electoral context if it is fake information about the mechanics of voting. You know, somebody wanted to put information out about that said, oh, the election's been canceled or it's been moved to a different day or something like that. They would take that down. So they've already dipped their toes in the water there. They have drawn a line that I'm sure they think is defensible but even people at Facebook, some of their own employees have written a fairly persuasive letter saying that they're not comfortable with the standpoint that Facebook has taken. I think that there is something to the notion of having offloading the responsibility to some neutral group third party representing a diversity of perspectives. You know, there are organizations like News Guard that have set up to try and provide some kind of fact-checking on what you're seeing online but you have to know to download their browser extension in order to take advantage of that. And of course, and Facebook claims to have for ads that aren't run by candidates, they do have a group that they turn to to do that kind of fact-checking. Of course, it's really critical to know who is in that group and whether all of the players in that group are in pursuit of truth. Jennifer, something that the commissioner said reminded me of another issue is about political ads but that kind of highlights this overall point that we're discussing right now is the role of the platform in deciding what's true and what's not. You know, recently, and it's got some headlines is why I'm mentioning it, a group had filed in DC at the FCC to hold broadcasters effectively liable for airing the president's briefings that they've been doing on coronavirus. Again, not under political advertising clearly but under a broader public interest standard. Now, putting aside the fact that it wasn't based on any actual FCC regulation that applied. So it was kind of thrown out out of hand. But again, that gets to this difficult position that folks find themselves in, the president's giving a briefing. You would assume that's the national issue that we want to cover but some people are raising issues. Oh, well, since there are things that are not true on there therefore the platform in this case, broadcasters should be held liable. Again, the FCC made quick work of that and put it to the side but it is an interesting conversation. Okay, this was an issue recently with Twitter and Facebook and Google all took down statements that the Brazilian president had said on the ground that it was perpetuating mistruths about cures for the coronavirus as well. Rick, this is another question to you. A question about your statement earlier that it was difficult to define controversial issues of public importance. And the questioner is asking about whether or not that is still true given guidance that the commission issued on this question like some time ago in 1978. And that's the questioner suggests that with this definition, with this clarification the definition is fairly workable on so on and some clarification as to your sense as to what the ongoing problem is. Yeah, I think workable is they've gone away from workable. I think the problem is it's maybe clearer in some ways because the way the FCC is now clarifying it it seems just to apply to almost anything. So a national issue of importance is such an amorphous term. We had sort of pushed the FCC. If it's something that involves a critical feature but it should involve something that is being debated by that race. So let's say it's two congressional candidates and we're talking about immigration policy that's certainly a national issue of legislative importance. But if it's the mayoral race somewhere in Iowa and it's about health care and they can't influence it all now that doesn't seem to be the same. But the FCC as at least appears to me as defined it as any issue of national importance that you happen to be talking about on the water cooler or wherever else that's now swept in. And that just again to us I think that broadens it way too much not only because the burdens that it now applies but it's missing the point of what I talked about the moving or shifting sans here and what the purpose was but even if you adopt the new purpose which is transparency, trying to figure out who's advertising about what as the commissioner mentioned how much they're spending you wanna have it fairly I think narrowly tailored to issues that matter that you wanna know that the people can have actually influence over and their issues that are being debated by Congress. Could you try to figure out the influence of money in politics? I think that's what it comes down to. But at this point and again because it's a hard thing to define I'm not saying the FCC had an easy task it does strike me that it got pretty broad and now it waters the whole thing down and so broadcasters are gonna be really over inclusive as they report these things and I'm not sure it's gonna ultimately be useful to those studying these issues. And so the consequences are disclosure consequences are there consequences beyond the disclosure consequences? No, it's really disclosure consequences that I'm talking about. Right and so and what are the risks and what are the risks of over disclosure? Oh, it's not no one's gonna be harmed no loss of life. I think what we're talking about is let's say you're studying you have a bunch of students come in to wanna study a project and you wanna study what issues are being covered how often they're being covered or being advertised about where they're being advertised about how much money's being spent. You're not gonna want to wade through lots of files of things that are not really pertinent are they're tangential? And so I think for because again I don't think this was the purpose of the of BICRA originally or any of the iterations but it sort of becomes something that I know the FCC has adopted, which is this notion of academics studying these issues should have access to these kinds of things. I do think it makes that process harder for them because for us in the broadcasting world to not be subject to fines for non-disclosure or not sufficient disclosure the incentive is to over disclose which in some ways you might not think it's a bad thing, but here it's not helping anybody by having the more issues included when you disclose. You really wanna know was this a healthcare ad or not because I wanna know I'm studying healthcare ads and how much was spent. Yeah, so though you could imagine that there might be different views on what constitutes a healthcare ad or a non-healthcare ad. And so you could imagine that some people would think there's no real harm in having additional information as opposed to less information in that situation. Yeah, but I think I guess but even the way the disclosure works so the only way you wouldn't include a non-health, let's say there's a debate over whether it's healthcare or not, somebody would put that even under the current regime over disclosing. You would, if you thought it was a different issue you'd put it down as a different issue so it still wouldn't count as a healthcare ad even with the order disclosure. What I'm talking about is issues that weren't really the, our main point maybe boil us down is what I think people really care about is what is the main focus of the ad? What is the ad really trying to convey? So in other words, let's say it is a, no one would debate it's a healthcare ad so you have a healthcare ad and at the very end of the ad it lists like six issues that the candidates for that they think will just list them on the screen. Our view is it's a healthcare ad. You should, that's useful to people to know their advertising about healthcare. The other issues, if you put them in that sort of waters down the meaning and the importance of that ad. And now though, it appears that what the FCC has clarified is that you have to list those issues at the end too. But again, they might have just thrown up on a screen at the end to say this candidate also supports this kind of immigration and this political candidate and this, so I think that's our only point. From a selfish, from our point of view so stepping back from the pure public interest the other issue for us is that unfortunately there are some groups that look for these foot faults as we call them. Oh, we had five of the six issues that the person doing the ad was like a sales rep, right? Missed the six issue was about something that actually is a matter of national importance. They didn't think it was, but it was. Thankfully the FCC has clarified that it's your best judgment for the person doing that. So that helps us quite a bit because we're just worried about being held viable for something that was not intentional. I think we probably have time for one last question. I'm going to direct to you commissioner which was a question about how is micro targeting any difference than targeted direct mail? Well, I think it really comes down to what the platforms know about you and how very narrow the targeting groups are. I think direct mail just doesn't have the same kind of information. Your mailbox doesn't know about you, everything that your laptop does and that the platforms suck out of all the information and all of the interactions that you have online. So I just think it's a question of how narrow the focus is and I know based on complaints that we get at the FEC on a regular basis that no matter how they try and target the mail, they always end up getting the mail in somebody's box that they weren't really intending because we get complaints based on those things. I got this mailer and it was misleading or it was this or it didn't have the disclaimer on it. So I know that they miss on the targeted mail but it's just a much narrower slice on the internet. The direct mail makes mistakes whereas micro targeting online is way too accurate. Please join me with a virtual round of applause for two wonderful panelists. Thank you so much for spending an hour with us. Really appreciate it. This podcast will be up tomorrow on you America's part of the free speech project at future tense, sorry, future tense which is a collaboration of ASU, Slate and New America. It will be on the website. Thank you, Rick Kaplan. Thank you, Commissioner Weintraub and thanks to all of you who are watching. Thank you, Jen.