Thread by @majorityfm

#AMQuickie

A new report shows that Donald Trump used Facebook for a massive voter deterrence operation in 2016, targeting up to 3.5 million black voters in swing states with negative ads about Hillary Clinton in an attempt to suppress votes and “cultivate hopelessness" » »

The report by UK's Channel 4 is based on a massive data leak of Trump campaign advertising data that shows the campaign compiled files on 198 million US voters and then used an algorithm to sort them into categories based on their economic and domestic statuses and other data »

One of these categories was called “deterrence,” which effectively meant voters who could be persuaded to stay at home if hit with the right ads. 3.5 million of those voters were black, and many of them lived in swing states like Florida »

The Trump campaign then aggressively targeted those voters w/ negative ads about Hillary Clinton, relentlessly pointing to her admittedly terrible record on race and criminal justice in an effort to, in the words of Dr. Cornell West, “cultivate hopelessness” among black voters »

What’s more, then-campaign manager Brad Parscale testified under oath that the campaign did not target based specifically on race in its persuasion efforts »

The story here is not so much that the Trump campaign did something racist and disenfranchising to black people --part of the GOP playbook for years.

It’s that Facebook gave them the very specific and powerful tools to do so, and they took full advantage of it while denying it »

We know already that they’re going to try something similar, this time perhaps by leaning in to myths about voter fraud and conspiracies about vote by mail in order to cultivate that same hopelessness and confusion among people who want to make a change » fans.fm/p/JkNepWE

SOURCE: channel4.com/news/revealed-…