Political Ads on Social Networks
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/19/russian-election-ads-social-media-congress-bill-243955
As the investigation into Russian ads on Facebook continues, there is more discussion about the regulation of these ads. Because laws about political advertising were written before the advent of the internet, nobody knew quite how they should be applied. As a result, there ended up being almost no regulation on advertising on websites such as Facebook and Twitter. As a result, the Russian-bought advertisements went completely under the radar and are much harder to track than they otherwise would’ve been. It also was not apparent at the time who was funding the ads, so people could have been misinformed. Senators are proposing that ads must state who their purchaser is on the ad itself in order to show people the source of the advertisements. Congressmen also propose that a database is kept of everybody who purchases or attempts to purchase an add slot so it’s easier to investigate anything that happens.
Ads are very interesting from a networks perspective as they add one way links from sites in an attempt to boost traffic. This helps to boost PageRank and other metrics of traffic at a monetary cost to the ad purchaser. In the case of these Russian ads, the pages they linked to were intended to spread social and political discord in the months leading up to the 2016 election. If the ads said something like “paid for by Russian citizens” then they likely would have been less effective. This would lead to less traffic to the advertised sites.