Suppressing the Vote with Facebook Ads

Thanks to a Politico article this week, we’ve now learned that both the Trump campaign and Russian troll agencies were concurrently using targeted Facebook advertisements to draw votes away from Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The Trump Campaign’s central focus on this strategy — using targeted Facebook ads to divert or discourage people rather than move them toward Trump — was a devious and unconventional approach. It now appears that the Russian campaign to elect Donald Trump conveniently followed the exact same approach. This raises three important questions:

• How did such an unconventional focus on this tactic make its way to a Russian influencer campaign?
• What could explain the fact that both the Trump campaign and Russian actors decided to employ the same complex unconventional technique during the 2016 election?
• And what Senator Mark Warner called the “million-dollar question” still remains: How did the Russians know exactly who to target on Facebook?

What we know about the Trump campaign’s unorthodox voter suppression effort.

• In the final days before the 2016 election, a time when many would have expected the Trump campaign to prioritize mobilizing its supporters, a senior Trump official was quoted stating that the Trump campaign had “three major voter suppression operations under way.”
• These three voter suppression operations were directed towards potential Clinton voters, including “idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.”
• These “controversial” operations were not attempting to win any new votes for Trump; rather, the idea was to either sway voters towards third-party candidates, like Jill Stein, or sow enough doubt in the minds of these voters to convince them to stay away from the polls on election day altogether.

Facebook advertisements played a huge role.

• A core part of the aforementioned strategy used Facebook “dark posts,” unpublished page posts that only appear to targeted Facebook users.
• The ability to target specific ads to specific users creates “infinite combinations of possible audiences,” which makes “tracking the messages within [the ads] nearly impossible.”

Russian-bought Facebook ads strike a similar tone.

• New information regarding the usage of Russian-backed Facebook ads in the 2016 election indicates that some of these ads benefitted Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders. Facebook also indicated that the Russian ads “[amplified] divisive social and political messages.”
• These ads reveal a complex strategy to “create divisions” within voter ranks, rather than sticking solely to promoting Trump and criticizing Clinton.
• Some backed Stein or even Sanders after his campaign had ended.
• In drawing voters away from Clinton, often without even using overtly anti-Clinton rhetoric, these strategies clearly parallel the Trump campaign’s voter suppression efforts.

C