More than 3.5 million black voters were bombarded with advertisements online by the campaign team of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016. The strategy was to keep them at home on Election Day and not vote for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. That discovered Channel 4 News Monday after studying data.
The data contains information on more than 200 million American voters. It shows that 3.5 million black voters were categorized as’Deterrenceor discouragement. The team wanted these voters to stay at home on Election Day.
These voters were bombarded with ads on Facebook in which Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton referred to black youths as “predators.” The Trump campaign spent 55,000 dollars (47,000 euros) in the state of Georgia alone to distribute this ad. The Cambridge Analytica company admits this, according to confidential documents submitted by Channel 4 News are seen.
Cambridge Analytica is at the heart of the privacy scandal surrounding Facebook. The company inadvertently got hold of the data of millions of Facebook users. According to Facebook, this concerns data from a maximum of 87 million users, 90,000 of which are in the Netherlands. The company was dismantled in 2018.
Trump and his campaign posted nearly six million different versions of messages on Facebook in 2016 that came directly to Facebook users on their timelines. The team was helped by a Facebook employee.
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