Who's really paying your favorite political creator? This Congressman wants to know.

Already ubiquitous in the corporate space, campaigns and political groups are increasingly deploying influencer marketing strategies to push their messages online and reach new audiences. Political campaigns will either enlist a creator marketing firm or work directly with social media creators, providing them with talking points and paying them to share original content. Often, that financial relationship goes undisclosed, because while the FEC requires "paid for by" disclosures in TV, radio, and mail advertising, the influencer marketing space remains pretty much the wild west.

That dynamic came to the fore in the California gubernatorial primary last month, when one candidate paid creators hundreds of thousands of dollars with very little disclosure, and rival campaigns cried foul. Taken together with a myriad of other examples this cycle, it has led one top journalist to write “The influencer political advertising boom is poisoning democracy.”

Rep. Mark Takano, a congressman from Riverside, California, has watched the whole mess play out as a California voter and wanted to do something about it at the federal level. Last week, Takano introduced the “Promoting Authenticity with Influencer Disclaimers” or P.A.I.D. Act, which would update FEC requirements and force campaigns and creators to disclose their financial relationship by attaching some type of disclaimer to campaign-funded creator content. I sat down with him on Friday to talk about what's driving the bill, where it falls short, and why things will probably get messier before they get better.

The below interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Kyle Tharp: Tell me about the PAID Act—you're obviously a California voter and social media consumer. What made you want to take this on this issue, and what would your legislation do?

Rep. Takano: I was annoyed when I saw influencers looking like whatever they were doing was very organic — like they were giving their unvarnished opinion about candidate X or Y. And then, come to find out, somebody paid them to say good things or post good things, or say negative things about so-and-so. I thought: this is very untransparent.

Influencers themselves should be interested in making sure [disclosure] is a norm, because in the long run they're going to damage their own credibility with their followers. But that's not really my interest. My concern is democracy and voters being able to know where a political message is coming from, who's paying for it. Is it a foreign source? Is it a special interest they might disagree with? Voters should be able to weigh all of those things.

As I looked into it, there was a gap in federal law. We cover networks, TV, radio. Whenever we do a media advertisement, I say "I'm Mark Takano, and I approve this message." That disclaimer goes on all mail we put out. Even campaign yard signs need to say "paid for by" whatever entity it is — and then voters can go look at the list of donors who contributed to its production and distribution. Influencers have followings of millions of people. That's how news gets out now.

Two thirds of people are now getting their news through social media, and influencers are a big part of that ecosystem. They're not held to any journalistic standards. But in federal elections, we can hold them to a standard of disclosure: who's paying you to say certain things, and are you really saying these things because you personally believe them? Voters have the right to know that you've been paid, because that may have had something to do with why you're saying what you're saying.

Kyle Tharp: So your solution, the P.A.I.D. Act, essentially gives the FEC authority to require that disclosure?

Rep. Takano: Yes, that’s right. There are some areas the bill does not cover — 501(c)(4)s, for example. That's just because we were interested in getting legislation introduced rapidly. I do intend to do more work in this area. 501(c)(4)s are one place we still need to figure out how to cover. But the bill would give the FEC the authority to regulate in this area.

Kyle Tharp: There's an interesting carve-out in the legislation that seems aimed at what we saw in California last month — the situation where an influencer claimed he was paid $400,000 by a gubernatorial campaign not to post, but as a "digital advisor." Can you walk through how the bill handles that?

Rep. Takano: What we tried to do is draw a distinction. If you're being paid to advise on how to reach certain minority voters…and you're being hired because you have special insights into what issues might motivate those voters, okay. That's separate from the idea that you're actually posting things and becoming a mouthpiece for outreach using your own following within that niche. That's where the PAID Act becomes relevant. That's where we're saying: you've crossed the line. You're no longer just an advisor, you're now a mouthpiece. And when you become a mouthpiece, voters have a right to know that you've been paid by the candidate.

Kyle Tharp: Ultimately, the FEC could sanction campaigns who do not have their paid creators disclose their paid relationship. But that requires the creators to actually put some type of disclaimer on their content. Who bears the responsibility for actually executing the disclosure — the campaign or the creator — and what happens if they don't?

Rep. Takano: That's a good question, I don't fully know the answer yet. This is the first iteration of the legislation, and I felt it was important to get the issue on the table. The main thing was to strike while the iron was hot — while the election is fresh in people's minds. Voters don't like being deceived by cleverness. They want a level playing field where they have access to all the information they need to make a decision. The point of this legislation is to plant a stake in the ground and say, this is an issue that you all should care about. As people think about it, I believe they'll want these requirements put into place.

Kyle Tharp: The midterms are coming, the 2028 presidential race is right around the corner, and there's so much gray area here — like you mentioned, 501(c)(4)s, c(3)s running quasi-political creator campaigns. Do you think this gets messier before it gets better?

Rep. Takano: I think so. I'm hopeful that two things can happen on their own. There's competition within the creator space, and creators will have a tendency to hold each other accountable — someone in the same space can say, "Hey, you're only saying that because you've been paid." But I don't think we can rely on that alone, because there's so much potential money involved.

The other element is the role of journalists, who have journalistic standards. I see a real role for media organizations to start paying attention to this in high-stakes contests, partly because they're actually competing for the same audience attention. But we need a third factor in there: legal sanctions. You have to obey these things. That's only going to increase the power of say, media organizations or competing influencers to hold others to account — because exposure means you'll face financial penalties if you don't follow the new legal norms.

Kyle Tharp: I think you probably have a lot of education work to do with your colleagues on The Hill… 

Rep. Takano: I actually think my colleagues are more likely than not to be tuned into this. You know, the voters that really pay attention are aware of [the issue] too. The education really has to be with a large swath of occasional…voters that may not be aware of how they may be manipulated by the social media ecosystem. 

Democratic centrist thinktank Searchlight conducted a survey to understand Americans’ attitudes towards major partisan media influencers. The group found that although two-thirds of respondents were familiar with Tucker Carlson, only 16% knew who Hasan Piker was.