The draft does ask the commission to consider issues like privacy and security when establishing the practices. However, the 15-person commission would be led by the Attorney General, and current AG William Barr has been a vocal opponent of end-to-end encryption. As the draft law would let Barr modify the rules without a consensus, it wouldn’t take much for him to require a backdoor and thus weaken encryption for everyone by creating a hacker-friendly vulnerability.

Riana Pfefferkorn, an Associate Director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, also warned that the commission wouldn’t have much oversight. She also noted that the last modification of Section 230, for FOSTA-SESTA, is facing a constitutional challenge and appears to have done more to hurt sex workers than curb sex trafficking.

This is a draft bill and isn’t guaranteed to reach the Senate Judiciary Committee as-is, let alone make it to the floor for a vote or pass both sides of Congress. Senator Richard Blumenthal was supposed to co-sponsor the bill, but there hasn’t been any sign of this so far. It does illustrate some congressional attitudes toward liability for online content, though, and suggests that Section 230 might be vulnerable in the future.

The ad was prompted by a line of questioning from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who asked Mark Zuckerberg at an October 23rd House hearing if Facebook would let her get away with posting a misleading ad about Graham.

The takedown suggests that Facebook is consistent in its approach to truthful ads. However, it also underscores the controversy over its refusal to block demonstrably false ads from politicians. It may not want to fuel accusations of bias, or wade into the debate over what constitutes a lie. At the same time, critics have argued that this hands-off approach isn’t really neutral. It reportedly favors those candidates most willing to lie, since they can cheat without being held to account like they would with TV ads. In this view, Facebook is content to let misinformation spread so long as it comes from certain sources.