"This is how Facebook won Donald Trump the 2016 election."

[RamsayBolton]

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and…

An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the …

www.goodreads.com

Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima, Elliot [Schrage] patiently explains to Mark [Zuckerberg] all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It's pretty fukking convincing and pretty fukking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump's campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shytpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. [Andrew] Boz [Bosworth], who led the ads team, described it as the "single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser. Period."

Then they'd pair their targeting strategy with data from their message testing. People likely to respond to "build a wall" got that sort of message. Moms worried about childcare got ads explaining that Trump wanted "100% Tax Deductible Childcare." Then there was a whole operation to constantly tweak the copy and the images and the color of the buttons that say "donate," since slightly different messages resonate with different audiences. At any given moment, the campaign had tens of thousands of ads in play, millions of different ad variations by the time they were done. These ads were tested using Facebook's Brand Lift surveys, which measure whether users have absorbed the messages in the ads, and tweaked accordingly. Many of these ads contained inflammatory misinformation that drove up engagement and drove down the price of advertising. The more people engage with an ad, the less it costs. Facebook's tools and in-house white-glove service created incredibly accurate targeting of both message and audience, which is the holy grail of advertising.


Trump heavily outspent Clinton on Facebook ads. In the weeks before the election, the Trump campaign was regularly one of the top advertisers on Facebook globally. His campaign could afford to do this because the data targeting enabled it to raise millions each month in campaign contributions through Facebook. In fact, Facebook was the Trump campaign's largest source of cash.

Parscale's team also ran voter suppression campaigns. They were targeted at three different groups of Democratics: young women, white liberals who might like Bernie Sanders, and Black voters. These voters got so-called dark posts - nonpublic posts that only they would see. They'd be invisible to researchers or anyone else looking at their feed. The idea was: feed them stuff that'll discourage them from voting for Hillary. One made from Black audiences was a cartoon built around her 1996 sound bite that "African Americans are super predators." In the end, Black voters didn't turn out in the numbers that Democrats expected. In an election that came down to a small number of votes in key swing states, these things mattered.

 

[Kasgoinjail]

Arrest Suckerberg

EXPEDITIOUSLY

 

[chineebai]

so basically like a regular facebook campaign, a/b testing, lookalike modeling but just with nefarious intent.

 

[Seoul Gleou]

And yet tiktok was the security threat.

 

[get these nets]

Trump had never held elected office before and had a history of failed business ventures.
Neither the Russian or Facebook disinformation campaigns " handed him " the election. Responsibility lies squarely on the American voters who made the conscious decision that a loud obnoxious novice was the better choice for president.

Disinformation is very real, and we've discussed multiple campaigns and targeted groups, but Trump was so unqualified for the office that this author is reaching here.

 

[Bigblackted4]

And clearly X won him this election but the story won’t come out until 2032

 

[concise]

Trump had never held elected office before and had a history of failed business ventures.
Neither the Russian or Facebook disinformation campaigns " handed him " the election. Responsibility lies squarely on the American voters who made the conscious decision that a loud obnoxious novice was the better choice for president.

Disinformation is very real, and we've discussed multiple campaigns and targeted groups, but Trump was so unqualified for the office that this author is reaching here.

Most American voters are stupid and easily swayed and fooled.

Learning how to manipulate them wins elections and disinformation is a tool.

 

[ViShawn]

It's interesting to see how the right co-opted things like Podcasts, X, social media etc.

 

[ReasonableMatic]

And yet tiktok was the security threat.

TikTok Ban Fueled by Israel, Not China

Congressional insiders spill the beans on how the law was passed

www.kenklippenstein.com

 

[King Poetic]

nikkas went crazy about super predators based off social media

Shows u how easy people have become easy prey

 

[Fillerguy]

Arrest Suckerberg

EXPEDITIOUSLY

The folks responsible for arrested people were "elected" by these people. Nothing will happen

 

[get these nets]

Most American voters are stupid and easily swayed and fooled.

Learning how to manipulate them wins elections and disinformation is a tool.

In your opinion, are any election results legitimate, then?

 

[concise]

In your opinion, are any election results legitimate, then?

My statement had nothing to do with the election being legitimate or not. If you are stupid, your vote still counts. It is up to the candidates to figure out a message that works for the voter pool.

Obama's win means future elections must be fought online

He may be older than most Facebook users, but Barack Obama understood the potential of social media to communicate and to raise funds - and left his 72-year-old opponent floundering

www.theguardian.com

Obama understood how to navigate social media in 2008 and Trump figured out how to use it to his advantage later on.

 

[the cac mamba]

-we were just coming off 8 years of a democrat, which meant a republican swingback was likely
-america has never elected a woman
-hillary was a horrible candidate who'd been disliked for 20 years

i'm tired of this bullshyt about trump stealing elections, because it gives him too much credit. he beat 2 unpopular women who were bad politicians, in a country that hasn't elected a woman in its 240 year history. that's not a conspiracy

we beat the fukk outta Trump in 2020, and we can do the same thing in 2028

 

[IIVI]

Hilarious thing about this: Facebook gets a lot of money from ads. A big portion actually.

Now all these tariffs mean less ads and that is going to kill their earnings.