You're both right. Sounds like a law that hasn't been updated yet for online ads.
>The laws that prohibit foreign nationals from spending money to influence U.S. elections do not prevent them from lawfully buying some kinds of political ads on Facebook and other online networks
While in one sense true, the Fortune article seems to be reading the word “television” (or perhaps “audio or audiovisual content”) into the phrase “cable, broadcast, or satellite” as a distribution mechanism when it is not, in fact, present where that phrase is used in FECA, as amended (FECA does have radio and TV-specific provisions, and they expressly name radio and TV, and they aren't the ones of interest here.) Absent case law to the contrary, which is not cited, it would seem by it's plain language to cover most real electronic media including the internet (advertising on a isolated RFC 1149 network would not be covered, of course, nor would ads in plenty of pre-telegraph “old media” like dead-tree-only newspapers.)
and if that Russian company was an agent of Russian government ( 101 chances out of 100 that it was, i.e. any reasonable person would think so :) then FB doing that company's bidding was acting as an agent of Russian government, and doing so without registration as such a foreign government agent sounds to me (not a lawyer though) like a violation of another item of the federal law. At least it looks like doing such thing was a violation before the current administration - now they seem to accept "retroactive" registrations, at least from their own folks - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-trump-campaig...
You can take your assertions further -- every Russian, national or not, is an agent of the Russian government with 101% certainty at that. Furthermore, everyone who associates with Russians is an agent as well, with a reasonably high degree of confidence.
WRONG. Nothing prohibits foreign entities from buying their own political ads.
http://fortune.com/2017/07/12/us-election-meddling-online-ad...