nited States Senate WASHINGTON, DC 20510 April 9, 2018 Larry Page Chief Executive Officer Alphabet Ine. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 Dear Mr. Page, ‘We write to urge you to implement stronger transparency and accountability standards for online political advertisements sold by Google. The dramatic increase in digital political advertisements = with $1.4 billion spent on online political ads during the last election — and the growing centrality of digital platforms in the lives of Americans, requires Congress to take meaningful action to ensure that laws and regulations provide fundamental accountability and transparency. As sponsors of the Honest Ads Act, we were pleased to see Facebook endorse our legislation and announce a series of measures to voluntarily comply with the bill’s provisions. As we work to pass the legislation in Congress, we believe that companies selling the most political advertisements should act immediately to ensure people have a clear understanding of who is, paying to influence our elections. ‘As you know, a combination of statutes, FEC rules, and FCC rules currently create a disclaimer and disclosure framework for political advertisements disseminated by broadcast, cable, and satellite providers. However, a provider like Google ~ whose base of active users of multiple products and services are each larger than the subscriber base of the largest cable or satellite provider — faces significantly fewer transparency requirements, This lack of transparency has dangerous implications for our democracy. As we saw in the 2016 presidential election, foreign actors can seek to influence the electorate without voters” knowledge through online political advertising. Recent revelations about the misuse of user data for political ad targeting have only heightened our concems regarding the ability for bad actors to abuse technology developed and managed by your company. Reports also indicate that Google worked directly with a secretive political group to target carefully tailored anti-Muslim ads to voters in key swing states, with Google’s sales staff and creative advisors providing technical assistance to the group to narrowly target the racially insensitive ads to key audiences.! The Honest Ads Act would apply analogous rules to online political advertisements that currently ional media, bringing long-overdue transparency to the opaque market of online ' Ben Elgin and Vernon Silver, “Facebook and Google Helped Anti-Refugee Campaign in Swing States,” Bloomberg (Oct. 18, 2017), available at: hixps:/www. bloomberg. comvnews articles/2017-10-18ifacebook-and- ‘google-helned-anti-refugee-campaign-in-swing-states; Robert Maguire, “Robert Mercer Backed A Secretive Group that Worked with Facebook, Google to Target Anti-Muslim Ads to Swing Voters,” Open Secrets: Center for Responsive Politics (April 5, 2018), available a: ips, sws/2018/04/exclusive-robert= ed. -with-facebook-google-to-iargetpolitical advertising. It would extend existing disclaimer obligations that print, broadcast, and cable ads must already meet to analogous political ads disseminated on online platforms like YouTube and Google Search. And it would require digital platforms to maintain a public record of political ads purchased by an advertiser who spends more than $500 in any 12-month period. Lastly, it requires that all advertising platforms — whether broadcast, radio or digital — make reasonable efforts to ensure that the prohibition on foreign nationals attempting to influence our elections through donations, expenditures or other things of value is not violated. These measures not only increase transparency in political advertising, but also promote accountability — both of platforms and of political advertisers. We were pleased to see both Twitter and Facebook announce voluntary commitments that embody at least some of the proposals contained in the Honest Ads Act. We encourage Google to take this issue seriously and adopt similar commitments to enhance transparency for their users. In addition, we encourage you to follow Facebook’s lead and endorse the Honest Ads Act. Sincerely, wh K Mine, MARK R. WARNER United States Senate