As Facebook and Google continue to ban political ads, Republican super PACs are spending millions on other platforms that offer no advertiser transparency
Facebook and Google are still banning political ads on their platforms, but that hasn't stopped Republican super PACs from spending millions … Tweets: @issielapowsky , @brendan_fischer , and @digiphile Tweets: Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : NEW: Facebook and Google are still banning political ads — effectively pushing millions of dollars in digital ads onto platforms like Hulu that have far less transparency ahead of the Georgia runoffs. https://www.protocol.com/... Brendan Fischer / @brendan_fischer : Super PACs have already spent over $5M on digital ads in Georgia's senate races. But none of those ads have run on Facebook and Google. Instead, the ads are running on platforms like Hulu, which means we have no idea what the ads actually say. https://www.protocol.com/... Alex Howard / @digiphile : New York State passed a law imposing disclosure requirements on digital political ads in NY based on the Honest Ads Act, but @Facebook & @senatemajldr blocked one of @SenJohnMcCain's last bills from moving in the the Senate. Self-regulation isn't enough: https://e-pluribusunum.org/... https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The migration was set up over a year earlier, when Google limited microtargeting of political ads and frustrated campaigns on both sides, and when Facebook weakened the researcher tools used to track political ads just as 2020 spending ramped up. When Facebook and Google extended their ban past Election Day into the Georgia runoff window (blocking political ads since Election Day), they did not remove the demand — they displaced it.
First-order effects
- Republican super PACs have redirected more than $5M in digital spending for Georgia's senate races onto Hulu and similar platforms that accept political ads with little advertiser transparency.
- Democrats, who say the bans are hurting runoff fundraising, lose access to the two largest digital ad channels during the exact window the Georgia races are being decided.
Second-order effects
- Streaming and other non-banning platforms become the default destination for displaced political budgets, gaining revenue precisely because their targeting and creative remain opaque to outside scrutiny.
- Watchdogs and academics lose visibility into who is saying what to whom: the transparency infrastructure exists at Facebook and Google, but the money is no longer there to observe.
Third-order effects
- If bans keep pushing spend toward low-disclosure platforms, state-level fixes modeled on New York's Honest Ads Act-style disclosure requirements will lag behind where the money actually runs, and the bans risk achieving neither transparency nor, as later researchers argued, much reduction in misinformation.
The trend: Political ad dollars are migrating from the most transparent platforms to the least whenever the majors restrict election advertising, trading oversight for access.