Mr. David Cicilline:

When rolling out this recent public policy allowing politicians to pay Facebook to spread lies, Mr. Zuckerberg said it was not appropriate for one company to decide what political ads can appear on Facebook and what cannot. If the problem here is that Facebook should not be exercising this kind of power, is the problem not that Facebook has too much power? Should we not think about breaking up that power rather than allow Facebook's decisions to continue to have such enormous consequences for our democracy? Dr. Bickert said that Facebook does fact-checking for a number of other things but does not do fact-checking for political ads. The cruel irony is that her company is invoking the protections of free speech as a cloak to defend its conduct, which is, in fact, undermining and threatening the very institutions of democracy it is cloaking itself in. That is the cruel irony: the idea that it is only generating a small part of its revenue. Its CEO said it is 0.5%, which is €330 million in revenue.

That may seem insignificant to a company of Facebook's size but it is a substantial revenue source.

Does Facebook currently prohibit the payment of political advertisements in foreign currency? Can a politician or someone else in the US use rubles, or any foreign currency, to pay for a political advertisement?