This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 28th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Shield Act purports to limit foreign influence in U.S. elections, but its provisions also include a vast

wish list of restrictions on Americans' political speech.

The bill passed the House along party lines.

Scott Blackburn is research director at the Institute for Free Speech.

We spoke last week about how the Shield Act would limit political engagement.

What is the Shield Act?

The Shield Act is the latest attempt by House Democrats to regulate online political ad activity

under the guise of preventing foreign meddling in election like

we saw in 2016. So what's in it? So the largest portion of the Shield Act is almost verbatim the Honest

Ads Act, which was the previous attempt by House Democrats to regulate and

restrict online activity vis-a-vis this guys.

It also includes some provisions that prevent contacting, prevent campaigns from contacting foreign officials, makes it a crime not to report

those kind of contacts, but the vast majority of it does two things. It creates a large public file that anyone who is an

online platform of a certain size has to comply with of all online ads and who they were targeted at, who saw them what the

ads said, who paid for the ad. That public file is not just for campaign ads, it's for any ad that's a national issue of public importance,

which obviously covers almost the entire world of advertising and it also regulates online

ads that mention candidates that doesn't otherwise advocate for them so it expands the what are called electioneering

communications to online political ads where they previously haven't gone

before. So it takes those TV regulations and tries

clumsily to stick them online.

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