MoveOn.org's fuzzy McCain-Palin Facebook ads

Facebook users will have repeatedly seen a series of small advertisements that point to media outlets catching Sarah Palin or John McCain in a lie.  At least, that's what the ads say.

"Jake Tapper: Palin lied," says one ad that points to a column by the ABC correspondent.  "AP: Palin lied again," says a second.  A third continues on the theme:  "NBC: Palin lies lies lies."  One even got YouTube in on the action:  "YouTube says: McCain lied," it read.  "Amazing."

The thumbnail-size advertisements carry no indication of who paid for them. And because the ads so closely resemble the paid web ads news organizations often buy to boost to their own stories (a practice we noted here), it would take an act of sustained curiosity to tell that these were political advertisements at all. 

Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal got curious, and eventually asked the liberal action group MoveOn.org if it was behind the campaign. It was. 

But unless you happen to have caught the Journal's blog post that day, you'd still have no way to tell the ads come from a partisan advocacy group. The spots continue to circulate today, sans disclaimer. It appears that the possibility of voter confusion is not keeping MoveOn up at night.

Indeed, rather than attempt to eliminate the issue, the group has invoked a strange campaign law loophole that it says makes their ads "totally legal" by exempting the following class of items from the need to include a disclaimer:

(i) Bumper stickers, pins, buttons, pens, and similar small items upon which the disclaimer cannot be conveniently printed;

Let's ignore that this provision is clearly aimed at physical objects upon which only a couple of words can readably fit. The main question, then, is whether or not it's "convenient" for MoveOn to include a disclaimer in this case, given that Facebook ads can only accommodate 140 characters. 

Which, no, is not very many -- perhaps enough for a few sentences. But adding the 20-character phrase "Paid for by MoveOn," would only reduce the amount of space for the main message by 15%.  Meaning the only inconvenience would be suffered by the intern writing the ad copy -- suddenly she'd have only 120 characters to say what she'd just said in 140. Welcome to the big time, kid.

Adding to MoveOn's somewhat incongruous position are several other ads it has purchased on Facebook. In these others, which generally are selling T-shirts, stickers, and other campaign goodies, the name MoveOn is prominently included, lest a user mistakenly send their T-shirt money to the wrong Obama merchandiser. (Amusingly, the stickers themselves contain MoveOn's name in small print too.)

It would be one thing if MoveOn was using the political ads to point to its own content. Then the identification would be implicit. But in the case of the "lie" ads, they're linking directly to third-party news stories, giving no hint that there's an invisible middleman -- and one with an unsubtle agenda. 

That agenda includes a relatively low standard for labeling something a "lie" -- a word news organizations are careful about throwing around, not least in headlines. Read Jake Tapper's piece and you might wonder if Tapper would say he'd called Palin a liar, or if instead he'd say that he was pointing out some of the candidate's inconsistencies on global warming. Point being, try to put that particular word in any reporter's mouth and you're likely to get a finger bitten off. 

In its excitement to cry liar, MoveOn has been a bit uncareful as well. The ad headlined "YouTube says: McCain lied" linked to this Politico post, where Ben Smith reported that YouTube removed a McCain political ad because it made unauthorized use of footage from CBS.  Smith's post -- which, again, was the page to which the MoveOn ad linked, clearly states that YouTube removed the footage "on the request of CBS," not of its own accord.  (The headline of Smith's post is "CBS takes down McCain webad, suggests it's 'misleading.'") MoveOn removed that ad from Facebook after I asked about it.