See what's behind the curtain before you respond to it.

To the Members of the United States Congress:

We write to ask you to finish something this country started nearly a century ago.

When commercial broadcasting reached the American public over radio and television, Congress recognized a simple principle: people have a right to know when they are being sold to, and by whom. Section 317 of the Communications Act requires broadcasters to disclose when content airs in exchange for payment. Hiding that relationship — "payola" — is punishable by fine or imprisonment. We decided, as a nation, that persuasion aimed at the public must be visible as persuasion.

That principle never fully made the journey onto the platforms that have since replaced broadcast as the place where Americans spend their attention. Online, disclosure rests mainly on the FTC's requirement that influencers reveal a "material connection" to a brand — a narrower, harder-to-enforce standard. And the modern advertising system has made the very thing that standard depends on — knowing what is an ad — almost impossible for an ordinary person to see. When persuasion is delivered as a friend's post, a creator's daily life, or an algorithmically chosen video, the line between content and commerce disappears. Often, that blurring is not accidental. It is the product.

In 2026, courts began to confirm what the public already sensed. A New Mexico court found Meta a public nuisance and a significant contributing cause of a youth mental-health crisis. A California jury found platforms were designed to be addictive. The harm is no longer theoretical. What is missing is a framework to answer it.

Congress has already taken the first steps, and we thank you for them. The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act would open secure, privacy-protected pathways for independent researchers to study what these platforms actually do. The Algorithm Accountability Act would hold platforms accountable for the design of their algorithmic products. These are the right instincts. We ask you to carry them further, toward a single, concrete public right:

The right to see the persuasive intent behind what we are shown.

The platforms already possess this information. To serve advertisers and maximize revenue, they have built systems that classify, in fine detail, what every post is and what it is engineered to do. The intent is already known — to them. We ask only that it be made visible to the people it acts upon. Specifically, we ask Congress to:

1. Require large platforms to disclose paid and engineered content — not buried in settings, but visibly, at the point a person encounters it: who paid, and what the content is designed to do.
2. Where platforms will not disclose it themselves, require that they permit the public to see it — by allowing independent, non-commercial tools to access and surface that intent, rather than technically blocking them.

This second point is the heart of our request. Transparency should not depend on a platform's willingness to expose its own business. If a company will not turn on the lights, it must at least be forbidden from switching them off for those who try. Tools built to serve the public — like the free one our organization is building — can surface this intent for any user, of any age, functioning as a transparency layer the way parental controls work for families, but extended to everyone. We do not ask to remove anyone from digital life. We ask that people be allowed to see into it.

The next era of this technology — AI-generated persuasion — is arriving before we have finished governing the last one. We never completed the transition of consumer-protection principles from the broadcast age to the platform age. We are asking you to complete it now, before the gap grows wider still.

The courts have found the harm. Congress has begun the work. The public is asking you to finish it.

Respectfully,Peekaboo — a project of The Suskind Foundation Corp