Several members of the U.S. Senate, including Senator John McCain, are pushing for a new bill that would force online advertisers such as Google LLC and Facebook Inc. to be more transparent about who exactly is purchasing their ads.

The bill, which is named the Honest Ads Act, is a direct response to recent revelations that organizations linked to the Russian government purchased thousands of online ads targeting Americans during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

So far, Facebook, Google and Twitter have all confirmed that they unknowingly sold ads to Russian groups. Facebook eventually agreed to turn the ads over to Congress despite turning the request down at first, but if the new Honest Ads Act is passed, Facebook would not have a choice in the matter.

Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, the lead author of the bill, she said that companies such as Google and Facebook can’t adequately self-police, which is why she said legislation is needed. “They have to realize the world has changed,” Klobuchar told the New York Times.

In an interview on MSNBC, Klobuchar said the Russian-purchased ads are a national security issue. Although the new bill would not forbid companies from selling ads to foreign groups, Klobuchar said that “Americans must be able to know who is paying for these ads.” Similar regulations are already in place for television and other traditional media, but the internet has remained mostly exempt from these laws.

Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner, co-author on the bill, added that the goal of the bill is to ensure transparency without overregulation.”This is the first substantive bipartisan piece of legislation that’s trying to — with a very light touch, because we don’t want to slow down innovation, or restrict free speech or people’s access to the internet — to deal with the problem that we saw in 2016 in terms of foreign interference in our electoral process,” said Warner.

Even if the bill passes, it will not be an easy task for massive companies such as Google or Facebook to keep track of all of the ads that are purchased on their platforms. Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of policy and communications, explained in September that many of Facebook’s ads are purchased through an automated system, and there is often no personal interaction with the businesses buying ads.

Schrage explained at the time that keeping an eye out for this sort of abuse is “a game of cat and mouse” that requires a sophisticated combination of “machine learning, data science and highly trained human investigators.”

Facebook and Google have yet to comment on the Honest Ads Act, but Klobuchar told the New York Times, “I’m not going to tell you they support this bill right now.”

Photo: Geoff Livingston The Dark Capitol via photopin (license)