Despite the FEC’s rule-making in 2006, the second issue that emerged in the
aftermath of BCRA concerned the classiﬁcation of political ads. The issue was
not so much a gray area as it was – in many eyes – an omission. BCRA was
motivated in part by an explosion of political advertising on television in the late
1990s by parties and outside groups that purported to be about issue education
and not elections (Franz 2008). Parties used so-called unregulated “soft money”
to sponsor these ads; and many outside groups who sponsored such “issue ads”
(perhaps as their only election-related spending) considered them outside the
scope of elections, thereby making it unnecessary, in their view, to register as
a PAC with the FEC.
Social_Media_and_Democracy