EDITORIAL: Bogus online political ads undercut democracy

If online trolls, especially foreign ones, are doing their best to sway American elections, it stands to reason we have a right to know who they are.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that anonymously sponsored political ads on social media and Russian trolls played a bigger part in the 2016 presidential election than we understood at the time. It’s a problem that will only grow if left unchecked.

An effort by three U.S. senators to force internet companies such as Facebook and Google to disclose who buys online political advertising would be a step toward protecting our democracy. Internet companies are lobbying against it, but that’s to be expected. Ordinary Americans, if they care to better understand how our political system too often is bought and sold, should lobby for it.

Last month, Facebook admitted it sold about $100,000 worth of ads to a Russian troll farm linked to the Russian government. In politics, that’s not much money, but it feels like the beginning of something. We also learned that Google sold at least $4,700 worth of ads to buyers apparently connected to the Kremlin — again a small amount — and that Twitter found about 200 accounts linked to the same Russian groups that bought the Facebook ads.

Online political ads reportedly were used to suppress Hillary Clinton’s African-American support. Inflammatory ads of questionable fairness were aimed at swing voters on such issues as refugees, gay rights and guns.

And if you felt, as we often did, that serious online discussions of the issues were virtually drowned out at times by a noxious stream of surreptitious ads, hoaxes, haters, conspiracy theories and propaganda, you were on to something. After the election, BuzzFeed News calculated that in the three months running up to the 2016 vote, fake news headlines were more widely read and shared than real ones.

This is going to become a bigger worry. Spending on online political ads shot up nearly 800 percent from the 2012 election to 2016 as political campaigns saw the value in being able to target specific audiences with specific messages, and there’s little doubt it will continue to soar. Nothing wrong with that, in principle. Political ads are a valid and protected form of free speech.

But just as disclosure laws have been put in place for political ads on TV, radio and other traditional communications outlets, voters are better served when they know who is paying the bills for online ads. Whether the buyer is Russia. Or the Koch Brothers. Or your neighbor Bob.

Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has belatedly laid out a nine-point plan to curb online election abuses, but self-regulation has a way of becoming no regulation when serious money gets in the way. We need actual laws.

Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Mark Warner D-Va., want to force internet companies to tell the election commission who is footing the bills for online ads. Right now, that’s “a mystery,” they say.

But even that regulation would be just a start. The way Facebook works, it shows an ad to more and more people as users engage with it. That favors incendiary ads that people already agree with, a process that encourages polarization. It favors, frankly, fake news. Candidates and their supporters who deal in the juiciest garbage find they get the widest distribution of their ads for each anonymous dollar they spend.

Democracy is based on open give and take. The more time we spend in echo chambers with like-minded voters and the more bogus ads mislead us, the less likely elections will produce good leaders — leaders who owe you, not some unnamed buyer.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.