It's an arrangement complex and specific enough that there's little question it falls within the letter of the law—perhaps in part because the law lags badly behind technology and political campaigns in considering the role of social media in politics.

(A note: This article focuses primarily on OFA's Twitter account. The organization also controls the barackobama.com domain and its presences on Facebook and Tumblr, but Twitter is the most interesting example, and a broadly representative one.)

@BarackObama and the law

The body responsible for determining when organizations and elected officials break campaign finance law is the Federal Elections Commission. The FEC is a non-partisan body comprised of six commissioners—three Democrats, three Republicans—that evaluates gray areas of campaign activity and renders judgment.

There are two reasons that the FEC opinion usually trails political activity, as it very much is in the case of social media. The first is that it is necessarily responsive. Some organizations seek prior approval for situations that lie on the borders of existing law, but many apply a "ask forgiveness, not permission" mantra. The other reason the FEC trails is that it's a body comprised of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. In Washington, D.C., that's a sure-fire formula for ties—and at the FEC, a tie goes to the status quo.

The agency's primary concern is ensuring voters know who pays for what, who, for example, "approves of this message." But their antennae are mostly focused on money, not perception. Since there is value in @barackobama's 29 million followers—if you were to buy that number of followers from an online site like FollowerSale.com, it would cost you in excess of $153,000—how it might change hands is important, regardless of the name it carries. (The organization does have its own Twitter account, @OFA, which is much less popular.)

Jason Kaune, a partner at the California law firm Nielsen Merksamer, specializes in political law and ethics. Political campaigns, he told me, "have gotten much more aggressive, and both the IRS and the FEC have given them room to do it." Obama, while not eligible for reelection, is still subject to the candidate rules that those two agencies develop. And "when something's given to a candidate they have to pay for it."

But, he notes, "this is the reverse, a sitting candidate gave something to a (c)(4)"—namely, the social media accounts. Obama is getting political benefit, but not any economic benefit—so the FEC wouldn't care. This also explains why OFA will likely pay for use of the accounts. In that case, there's no gift at all.

More importantly, OFA has no FEC obligation to be explicit in each tweet that @barackobama isn't actually Barack Obama. First of all, FEC rules only apply to electoral activity. But regardless, no FEC decision or issued rule clarifies how campaigns may or may not use social media. In 2010, Roll Call reported that the agency wasn't "in any particular hurry to map out" that uncharted territory. "The closest the FEC has come to entering the brave new world of social networking," it reported, "was a 2002 advisory opinion on text messaging, well before the method was notably used in the 2008 election by Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign." In that case, an opinion from the vice chairman suggested that text messages are exempt from standard disclaimers required on ads "since text messages are so small." That's about it. (The idea of Twitter fine print has plagued the Federal Trade Commission, too.)