As campaigns have been rapidly hopping on board with a wealth of new digital tools, the FEC has struggled to figure out how to best ensure credibility and validity of campaigns’ messages. While they’ve decided web ads need text disclaimers, and microsites need the same paid-for language as direct mail. Facebook’s proven to be more difficult to regulate, with skirmishes over how much ads have to say (and where) and where to place the language on pages. Facebook Timelines seem ripe for a similar disagreement.

The asserted purpose of FB timeline is to give a “history” to brands or people. The Obama campaign has largely done just this–from making birth certificate jokes to highlighting his move to community organizing. Moreover, he combined it with a web video that doesn’t specifically name Timeline, but clicks through “The Story of Us” (covering the past five years) in a similar scrolling pattern, and exemplifies the use of the genre of the timeline in general to pitch a campaign narrative. Narratives have always been built on history, and anyone can write their version, but Timeline gives people a platform to push this narrative and a form through which to systematically prove its validity. The FEC, in turn, ensures that readers know who’s authoring these histories.

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