Transparency advocates sue to reveal who’s behind a shadowy Facebook campaign

You can violate US campaign finance rules with impunity on Facebook. Election officials can’t stop you. Facebook won’t stop you. So a transparency watchdog group is suing. That creates a second legal problem. Ads that “expressly advocate” for or against candidates must disclose who paid for the ads. Usually that’s a person, a campaign or some sort of non-profit. But “because APN is not a real entity, it could not have paid for the” ads, the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan campaign-finance transparency group, said in its court filing. “The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is the only government agency with the sole responsibility of enforcing the laws that govern our campaign finance system,” Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, told Quartz.

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