The Honest Ads Act, a recently introduced piece of legislation that would require large social platforms to keep more diligent records about who is buying political advertisements, now has endorsements from two Silicon Valley giants.
Twitter endorsed the Honest Ads Act in a series of tweets on its public policy account this afternoon, saying that the Honest Ads Act “provides an appropriate framework for [political] ads.” This comes after Mark Zuckerberg endorsed the act on his personal Facebook page last Friday.
The Honest Ads Act, sponsored by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), and John McCain (R-AZ), would require social media platforms with more than 50 million users to keep records of political advertisement purchases and to “make all reasonable efforts to ensure that foreign individuals and entities are not purchasing political advertisements in order to influence the American electorate.”
On Monday, Senators Klobuchar and Warner wrote open letters to Alphabet’s Larry Page and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, urging them to support the Honest Ads Act. As of this writing, Google has not yet publicly endorsed the Honest Ads Act.
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Twitter also touted one of its initiatives that is in the works called the Ads Transparency Center, which it previously said would show all ads that are currently running on Twitter, as well as what ads are targeted to each user. The company said it would be launching the Ads Transparency Center weeks after it unveiled the initiative in October; however, today the company said that it is preparing to launch the center in the summer. Twitter did not respond to a previous inquiry from Buzzfeed about why the center was delayed.
Zuckerberg is expected to be asked more about the Honest Ads Act and what other types of regulation Facebook would support during his testimony in front of congressional committees this Tuesday and Wednesday.
