Mr. David Cicilline:

With all due respect, Mark Zuckerberg's theory that sunlight is the best disinfectant only works if an advertisement is exposed to sunlight. However, as hundreds of Facebook employees made clear in an open letter last week, Facebook's advanced targeting and behavioural tracking tools make it "hard for people in the electorate to participate in the 'public scrutiny' that we're saying comes along with political speech. These ads are often so micro targeted that the conversations on our platforms are much more siloed than on other platforms."

It seems clear that micro targeting prevents the very public scrutiny that would serve as an effective check on false advertisements. Does the entire justification for this policy not completely fall apart given that Facebook allows politicians both to run fake ads and to distribute those fake ads only to people who are most vulnerable to believing them? This is a good theory about sunlight, but in practice Facebook's policies permit someone to make false representations and then to micro target who gets them. This big public scrutiny that serves as justification just does not exist.