In a recent state court decision, a King County judge in Washington State concluded that Facebook violated state political disclosure rules by not publicly providing information about the sale of political ads relating to state elections and ballot issues, as required by state law.  While there does not yet appear to be a written decision in the case, according to trade press the judge’s ruling rejected motions by Facebook parent Meta to have the law declared unconstitutional and to have penalties asserted by the State attorney general thrown out (see attorney general’s statement here).  We have written much on this blog about FCC regulations relating to political advertising and have noted how those rules do not apply to online platforms.  This case is but one example of how state laws are filling in some of the gaps in the regulation of political advertising.

As we wrote several years ago, the Federal Election Commission has only general rules requiring that paid online political advertising for federal offices have some identification of the sponsors of the advertising.  The FEC in 2018 started a rulemaking proceeding to determine if the “stand by your ad” certifications required in most federal broadcast and cable candidate advertising (the requirement which obligates the federal candidate to say “I’m X and I approved this message”) should carry over into the online world.  That proceeding has never been resolved – likely held up both because of the difficulty of resolving sensitive political issues at the FEC, and because of the inherent difficulty of adopting one-size-fits-all disclosure obligations for online media, where ads can range from TV-style videos to short tweets and textual messages to images displayed in virtual reality worlds.  Carrying over broadcast-style regulation to these diverse platforms is a tricky fit.
Continue Reading As More Political Advertising Moves Online, State Laws Provide the Regulatory Framework for Disclosures and Recordkeeping