Reporters tried to buy fake Facebook ads on behalf of all 100 US senators and Facebook approved all of them, following other high profile fake ad approvals
and Facebook failed to catch that they were frauds BBC : Fake Cambridge Analytica ad hits Facebook Cristiano Lima / Politico : The trouble with Facebook's political ads Andrew Hutchinson / Social Media Today : Report Finds Facebook's Political Ad Transparency Efforts Can be Easily Manipulated Fred Vogelstein / Wired : Facebook Sketches a Future With a Diminished News Feed Tweets: William Turton / @williamturton : We submitted the names of all 100 senators to appear in the “paid for by” disclosure at the top of political ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all 100. That means we could have run ads on Facebook that said “Paid for by Mitch McConnell.” http://news.vice.com/... Steve Kovach / @stevekovach : Facebook says it can't monitor all its political ads and needs the help of watchdogs and journalists. http://twitter.com/... James Surowiecki / @jamessurowiecki : Amazing piece. And this isn't about algorithms vs. people: it's about indifference. Facebook could obviously write an algorithm that would flag, say, all “paid for by Kamala Harris” ads and check to see if she actually paid for them. It just hasn't. https://news.vice.com/... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : Well this is suboptimal. http://news.vice.com/... Arvind Narayanan / @random_walker : Journalists posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them. Facebook's response—as usual—is to hope that outside groups will clean up its mess. Would the business model even be viable if Facebook didn't externalize its costs? http://news.vice.com/... http://twitter.com/... Adam Singer / @adamsinger : As I've said for years and am a broken record on, it's a joke how few folk Facebook employs on the ads / ad quality side. There's a reason Google has so many people working on this stuff. FB doesn't take anything serious enough. http://twitter.com/... Kyle Whitmire / @warondumb : So basically, Facebook just made a sweet new tool for anyone wishing to manipulate elections. Good job, y'all! http://twitter.com/... Josh Constine / @joshconstine : Smart report exposes how little vetting Facebook does of “paid for by” info volunteered by political ad buyers. I wrote in May the tool could “allow advertisers to cite some shell org or donor group that could obscure where the money really comes from.” Turns out you can just lie http://twitter.com/... Avi Asher-Schapiro / @aaschapiro : It turns out you can break news by merely checking if tech companies actually fixed things they've claimed to have fixed http://twitter.com/... Scott Galloway / @profgalloway : The “Paid for by” feature is easily manipulated & allow anyone to lie about who is paying for a political ad, or to pose as someone else paying for the ad. 100% of entirely fake content in experiment was approved by FB. http://news.vice.com/... William Turton / @williamturton : Facebook has not approved only two names in our tests so far: Mark Zuckerberg and Hillary Clinton. https://news.vice.com/... Steve Kopack / @stevekopack : Vice, posing as 100 different U.S. Senators, applied to buy fake ads on behalf of them through Facebook's new “Paid for by” ad system. All 100 fake applications were approved. It “appears to allow anyone to lie about who is paying for a political ad.” https://news.vice.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Facebook argued the Arab Spring showed social networks could spread democracy.In hindsight, what it showed was that social networks could be used to undermine & overthrow governments. And Facebook is making from it by pretending to stop it while http://news.vice.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's political-ad safeguards have been failing audit after audit through 2018–2019. A ProPublica investigation found 12 campaigns masking who sponsored issue ads just days after this stunt, and earlier reporting showed the platform's own growth tools being exploited by bad actors, as the Mueller indictment made plain in its Groups promotion features.
The pattern continued into 2020's run-up: researchers said Facebook had weakened or disabled the tools they use to track political ads even as spending ramped up, and an activist went so far as to [[a:947348|register as a California gubernatorial candidate purely to expose how false ads slip through]]. The VICE test — approval of all 100 senator impersonations — is the cleanest demonstration yet that the paid-for-by disclosure is honor-system, not verified.
First-order effects
- Any advertiser can put a sitting US senator's name in the paid-for-by line and buy political ads today, meaning Facebook's public ad archive — built as a transparency fix after 2016 — records sponsorships that were never checked.
- The 100 senators named in the test now have direct, personal evidence that ads can run under their identity without their knowledge or consent.
Second-order effects
- Journalists and watchdogs like ProPublica shift from spot-checking individual ads to systematically stress-testing the disclosure pipeline, since each failed audit generates headlines Facebook cannot dismiss as isolated.
- Legislators who were themselves impersonated gain a concrete anecdote for hearings and bills targeting platform ad verification, converting an abstract policy debate into a personal one.
Third-order effects
- If self-reported disclosures keep failing audits, political-ad verification migrates outside the platforms — toward regulators or third-party auditors — rather than remaining a feature Facebook builds and grades itself.
- The broader risk is that transparency features become compliance theater: archives exist and look accountable while the underlying identity check stays trivially bypassable, a structure that rewards whoever audits rather than whoever discloses.
The trend: Platform-run political ad transparency is proving unverifiable from the inside, pushing accountability toward external auditors and legislators who keep finding the same hole.