Trump 2016 campaign 'targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting'

[brooklynite]

Last edited Mon Sep 28, 2020, 02:50 PM - Edit history (1)

Source: The Guardian

Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election campaign has been accused of actively seeking to deter 3.5 million black Americans in battleground states from voting by deliberately targeting them with negative Hillary Clinton ads on Facebook.

The secret effort concentrated on 16 swing states, several narrowly won by Trump after the black Democrat vote collapsed.

...snip...

Comprising the records of 198 million Americans, and containing details about their domestic and economic status acquired from market research firms, the investigation claimed voters were segmented into eight categories.

One was marked “deterrence”. Those placed in the special category – voters thought likely to vote for Clinton or not at all – were disproportionately black.





Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/28/trump-2016-campaign-targeted-35m-black-americans-to-deter-them-from-voting

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Link to tweet

[2naSalit]

1. Ruh roh!

[ihas2stinkyfeet]

2. hillary won.

[rickyhall]

10. Not by 3 million, more like 6-7 million

We must kill the Electoral (Republican) College!

[ihas2stinkyfeet]

11. yup.

no more rules that favor slave holders and farmers.
and i say that as an urban farmer.

[lamp_shade]

3. I'll wait for more reporting on this.

[brooklynite]

5. Channel 4 news runs at Noon Eastern time.

[Qutzupalotl]

4. Sounds like the missing piece of the Cambridge Analytica story.

[Wellstone ruled]

6. Bingo!

Data Mining is worth trillions.

[FakeNoose]

9. And they supplied voter registration datafiles to Russian hackers too

I don't know if Cambridge worked directly with Russians, but I tend to think they did not.

Don't forget that Steve Bannon (recently arrested and charged) could shed a lot of light on things. He was overseeing this end during the campaign, and he knows where the bodies are buried - so to speak.

[crickets]

15. Also, Facebook has some explaining to do.

https://www.channel4.com/news/revealed-trump-campaign-strategy-to-deter-millions-of-black-americans-from-voting-in-2016

But many of the ads were so called ‘dark posts’, which could vanish from recipients’ feeds once a campaign stopped paying for them.

It means no complete public record exists of the ads posted on Facebook during the 2016 campaign or the audience lists used to target voters. The platform offered no ‘Ad Library’ at the time.

Without Facebook or the campaign itself revealing the information, it means it’s not possible to ascertain exactly how potential voters in the ‘Deterrence’ group may have been targeted on Facebook. [snip]

He added: “I don’t believe Facebook has fully disclosed their role, and fully disclosed the types of ads that were run, who was involved and literally how they may have been embedded in, say, the Trump campaign to make this all come to life.

[SharonClark]

7. How does putting "Deterrence" by someone's name prevent them from voting?

[Qutzupalotl]

8. That was an internal code. The strategy was to target voters

with individualized ads based on their deduced personality type garnered by their social media posts (microtargeting). So if you’re a disaffected Bernie supporter, you saw one type of weaponized ad. If you’re this or that other demographic, you saw another.

A lot of the memes were developed by assets of Russian military intelligence and were designed to provoke a response depending on your psychological profile. They would send discouraging, give-up-now messages to likely Democratic voters, and fight-back messages to Republican-leaning voters.

[LeftInTX]

14. Exactly

[marble falls]

13. They suppress the vote by mailings, emails, closing polling stations in communities ...

taking people off voter's lists .....

[iluvtennis]

16. + agree. nt

[Blue_Tires]

12. Greenwald, Scahill, Taibbi, etc. were unavailable for comment

[rockfordfile]

17. That's what the Democratic Party should be doing. Getting out the vote.