The situation has the potential to affect a key profit center for Facebook. The same proprietary technology that has made Facebook the go-to advertising platform for political campaigns also enabled Russian operatives to target U.S. voters with inflammatory ads. Now lawmakers, noting that online companies are not subject to disclosure rules governing broadcast advertising, are calling for tighter regulations as Facebook is poised to play another major role in the 2018 and 2020 elections.
Both Facebook and Twitter say Kremlin-linked organizations used their platforms to try and influence voters during the 2016 election. Here’s how. Facebook, Twitter reveal Russian meddling during 2016 election (The Washington Post)
Trump strategists credit their victory in part to a decision to go all-in on Facebook in the closing stretch of the 2016 race, with a strategy that was orchestrated from a San Antonio office where Trump campaign and Republican Party staffers worked alongside Facebook sales employees, blitzing the country with ads.
By Election Day, Trump’s campaign had spent roughly $70 million on Facebook alone — nearly all in the last four months of the election, according to people familiar with the spending.
“If you imagine the country as the haystack, Facebook is the needle finder,” said Brad Parscale, who served as the Trump campaign’s digital director.
With 210 million U.S. users logging in monthly, Facebook offers candidates and their allies the ability to zero in on potential voters who are likely to embrace their messages and make them go viral — identifying them by geography, gender, interests and their behavior across the Internet, including their “likes” for music, food and travel. The company owes its rich trove of data to its users, who turn over details about their personal lives every time they engage with the platform.
The large sums invested by the Trump campaign would have been enough to put an ad on the feed of every Facebook user in the country, digital strategists said, or to send multiple ads to key voters. The online bombardment, which former Clinton aides acknowledged surpassed their Facebook spending, was largely invisible to the media and the electorate. That’s because of its highly personalized design, which allows advertisers to target voters in a granular fashion.
Advocates for more online transparency say the 2016 election showed how Facebook and other websites can be used to push provocative messages with no oversight.
The news that Russians used Facebook to try to influence voters showed that people with “no interest in adhering to facts or the truth are able to message to select pockets of the population to elicit an emotional response, and no one knows that it is happening,” said Keegan Goudiss, who served as director of digital advertising for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, which relied heavily on Facebook.
After revealing the Russian ad buys, Facebook vowed to provide more transparency about political ads on its site, a move that could pull the curtain back on its position as a turbocharged platform for campaigns. After years of resisting disclosure, the company has pledged to create a mechanism that will reveal the content of political ads posted on its site, making them visible to any Facebook user. The system would go further than what is required of TV and cable stations, which have to disclose information about who purchases political ads but not the content of the ads themselves.