Online platforms: disclosures.

The Political Reform Act of 1974 provides for the comprehensive regulation of campaign financing and activities by the Fair Political Practices Commission. Under the act, political advertisements on online platforms are required to contain certain disclosure statements. This bill would require an online platform to maintain and make available for online public inspection a description of the audience requested by the committee and the types of personal information, as defined, used by the online platform to target the advertisement, including use by the online platform of characteristics such as age, gender, race, or other protected classifications under law. The online platform's chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, chief privacy officer, or the equivalent position of any of these officers, if applicable, would be required to personally certify, under penalty of perjury, that to their knowledge the online platform has correctly disclosed all activity under this law. By expanding the crime of perjury, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program. In addition, because a violation of the act is subject to criminal penalties, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program by expanding the act's criminal penalties. This bill would also require an online platform that has 10,000,000 or more unique monthly United States visitors or users for a majority of months during the preceding 12 months that targets political advertising, as described above, to make available an application programming interface or other technical capability to enable qualified third parties to conduct independent analysis of bias and unlawful discriminatory impact of that targeted advertising. The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement. This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this act for a specified reason. The Political Reform Act of 1974, an initiative measure, provides that the Legislature may amend the act to further the act's purposes upon a 23 vote of each house of the Legislature and compliance with specified procedural requirements. This bill would declare that it furthers the purposes of the act.