What, who is MotiveIA, used by News for Democracy, let’s pull some strings, bet it’s related to the program used on Roy Moore

Atlantic Article

The Secretive Organization Quietly Spending Millions on Facebook Political Ads Meet the liberal group that’s running a new breed of digital campaign

Oh that’s their game using right leaning titles with left leaning content, programmed AI!

Despite the God-and-country nature of the page names, the actual content was left-leaning. A series of ads running on Tuesday showed different people describing their health challenges and how their health insurance was helping them. In one ad, an older woman describes her daughter’s struggles with diabetes. In another, a young father talks about his autoimmune diseases. Their message is the same: Republicans want to take away protections for people with preexisting medical conditions, and that would hurt the nice, relatable people in the videos

Facebook built its ad archive hastily as the company’s central, opaque, and confusing role in the 2016 presidential election was revealed. Facebook had been played by Russian propagandists and fake-news purveyors, who bent a well-meaning system to nefarious political and economic end

News for Democracy highlights both the successes and limitations of Facebook’s transparency efforts. The archive is a real and significant attempt to provide a look into what’s happening with paid political and issue advertising on Facebook. Facebook’s broad definition of political advertising is why we know the startling scale of News for Democracy. Because it primarily advertises for politically tinged causes, and only rarely for or against specific candidates, most of its activity escapes Google’s stingier archiving process for ads running on its platform.

On the other hand, News for Democracy doesn’t need to post anything publicly about itself in order to run ads on Facebook. None of the individual pages have to divulge their corporate affiliations either. Who is funding the advertising remains completely obscure. (I asked. Fletcher demurred.)

With a little gumption and some savvy, News for Democracy and MotiveAI easily evaded Facebook’s system for making political ads more transparent

“In these cases, transparency and disclosure—especially when voluntarily and provisioned by private companies—doesn’t do much to solve the underlying issue, which is accountability, meaning the public’s ability to discern who is trying to influence the outcome of an election,” Jonathan Albright of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University told me.

While Facebook requires all ad sponsors to send it a government ID so that they can be “verified,” Facebook shares no information about the company that paid for a given ad, aside from the name. Given that LLCs are opaque and can pop into and out of existence, there is no formal mechanism for figuring out who is pushing what agenda. Though Fletcher maintains that his funding comes from Americans, it’s easy to imagine a hypothetical in which it does not. Let’s say MotiveAI had substantial Chinese or European investors. That foreign involvement could very easily be laundered through an American starting an LLC—even better, a thicket of LLCs that would make it more difficult to connect different purchases.

The biggest of News for Democracy’s ad buys went to pages with names like Women for Civility (8 million impressions), Better With Age (7.2 million), Our Flag Our Country (5.7 million), Living Free (5.4 million), and The Holy Tribune (4.2 million). Most of the ads consisted of one-minute videos, done in that Facebook style with text sliding around over footage making a single point. The ads were shown to two very specific groups of people: women ages 55 to 64 in Arkansas and mostly male Kansans under the age of 44.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/the-secretive-organization-quietly-buying-millions-in-facebook-political-ads/573289/