Amusing story about a draft bill that will try to restrict foreign money from paying for ads in social media. That is almost laughable, being brought in the wake of the Russian attempts to influence the national elections of several different countries.
First, the Russians paid in rubles for some of the items that were posted. That is not what an intellgence operation would do, so we can almost say the target of the this legislation is probably not the people who actually tried to manipulate the election. Let’s give the Russians some credit for knowing how to run a Political Warfare campaign.
Second, the ads were designed to not favor one candidate or another. They were aimed to support dissent of one kind or another. We have 1000 groups that would love to get money to favor some cause, and giving it to them is not something that qualifies as disruption. We allow that kind of thing to happen here, and the Russians just took advantage of our political system. The Chinese do that better than the Russians and were not even mentioned as being involved in the US election, even though they were.
Third, the only people who know the source of money coming into the US to buy these ads are central banks and intelligence services. The social media companies don’t know, and don’t want to know how that money finds its way into their bottom line. Getting any kind of enforcement of this kind of legislation is almost impossible. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to know who is doing it and how. That information will never be made public and even Congress knows that.
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