Bloomberg's 'social-media army' blurs the lines on political ads and makes it harder for people to know what they're looking at (FB)

Reuters

• Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign is consistently pushing boundaries on the the rules around political advertising on social media.
• He is in the process of hiring a "social-media army" to spread his message online, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
• Facebook's policy decisions on "branded content" may help Bloomberg's campaign evade scrutiny from researchers and journalists.
• Tech-industry insiders have already warned that Facebook needs to more clearly distinguish political ads from regular posts, and this will likely exacerbate the issue.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Last year, a group of Facebook employees sounded the alarm internally that users of the social network were having a hard time telling the difference between political advertising and normal posts.

In an open letter that circulated internally (and was subsequently obtained by The New York Times), they said ordinary Facebook users "have trouble distinguishing political ads from organic posts" and called on Facebook to "apply a stronger design treatment to political ads that makes it easier for people to establish context."

Four months later, their warning seems extremely prescient.

As the 2020 US presidential election heats up, there has been repeated confusion over social-media firms' advertising policies — which threatens to cause mass confusion for ordinary users.

At the forefront of the confusion is Michael Bloomberg's campaign for the Democratic nomination, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising (across various formats) and systematically pushing the boundaries of Facebook's social-media policies.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal first reported that the Bloomberg campaign was hiring a "social-media army" of hundreds of workers to spread Bloomberg's message on social media, paying them $2,500 a month to post about the billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Should these posts be considered ads? It's not clear — and it's an ambiguity that adds to Bloomberg's advantage.

Reached for comment, Bloomberg spokesperson Sabrina Singh confirmed the program, but denied that their posts would count as ads — saying it would be the staffers' own content on their own social media accounts. "We are meeting voters everywhere on any platform that they consume their news. One of the most effective ways of reaching voters is by activating their friends and network to encourage them to support Mike for president," she said in a statement.

But there's not a clear line between this and "branded content" — another form of paid partnership in which a user is paid by a brand to promote something, but Facebook/Instagram isn't paid to promote the post across its network (for example, a fashion influencer getting paid by a designer to post about a new dress).

The Bloomberg campaign will require workers to disclose their paid roles as "deputy field organizers," Singh said.

Bloomberg has forced Facebook to clarify its ad policies once already: Earlier this month, the candidate launched an Instagram ad blitz, sponsoring a bunch of high-profile meme accounts to post ironic memes involving him. In the wake of the campaign, Instagram said it would now require these kinds of posts to be classified as "branded content." (Political entities had previously not been allowed to run branded content.)

But, an Instagram spokesperson said, it would not categorize them as "advertising," nor will it include them in its Ad Library that provides a searchable database of all political advertising that has run on Facebook and Instagram (unless the post is also separately paid to be boosted as an ad).

Meanwhile, whether the ad is in the candidate's "voice" will also affect whether or not it's fact-checked. To use an example from TechCrunch: "If an influencer posted 'I support Bloomberg because he's a veteran and a war hero,' that would be in their own voice and could be fact-checked as false since he did not serve in the armed forces. But if an influencer posted 'Michael Bloomberg says 'Vote for me. I'm a war hero,'' that would be in the politician's voice and ineligible for fact-checking."

By excluding branded content from the Ad Library, it reduces transparency about what is shaping up to be a core strand of Bloomberg's social media advertising strategy, making it harder for researchers and journalists to understand how candidates are campaigning online.

But, by roping in ordinary people as "deputy field organizers" to post on its behalf, Bloomberg's campaign makes the line fuzzier still. To what extent are these workers being paid to promote "branded content" as opposed to just engaging in broader communications work?

To give another example: If an environmental charity hires someone and they post on their pre-existing social media accounts to promote the organization's work during their working hours, does that count as branded content or advertising? What about if it's a non-partisan political advocacy group? And how about an explicitly partisan organization?

A Facebook spokesperson didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment on how it would classify these workers' posts, though The Wall Street Journal reported that a spokesperson told them that "posts by outside 'content creators' would require labels if a campaign paid for them, but that posts by campaign employees wouldn't need to be labeled as ads. The company didn't address how it would categorize posts by employees paid to promote content to their personal social networks."

In short: The guidelines are murky, and there's not necessarily an easy solution for any of this — especially as candidates' campaigns deliberately push boundaries and look for loopholes to get their message out in new ways.

But in the mean time, it all adds up to ever-increasing uncertainty for ordinary users as to the origins, motivations, and factual accuracy of the political content that will swarm through their feeds over the next nine months.

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