A quiet rewrite of the rules governing political advertising online

The provision runs to four paragraphs and arrived without a press conference. Its effect is larger than its length suggests.

Under the rule, any paid political message delivered to fewer than a defined number of people must be logged in a public archive within twenty-four hours, together with the targeting criteria used to select the audience. The threshold is deliberately low, and it is aimed squarely at the practice of running thousands of slightly different messages at thousands of slightly different audiences.

Campaign strategists describe the change as an operational headache rather than a philosophical defeat. Compliance teams will need to classify material at the moment it is created rather than after the fact, and the archive makes contradictory messaging trivially easy for opponents to find.

Transparency groups that spent years lobbying for the measure called it a floor rather than a ceiling. Enforcement, they noted, depends on an agency whose budget has not grown in five years.

The rule takes effect at the start of the next cycle, which gives both sides roughly eight months to work out what it means in practice.