Saturday, October 07, 2017

The Trump campaign had embeds from Facebook helping them to utilize targeted advertising.

Courtesy of CBS: 

President Donald Trump talked on Twitter, but Facebook was the crucial tool that helped elect him, says the man who directed the digital aspects of the Trump campaign. Brad Parscale tells Lesley Stahl how he fine-tuned political ads posted on Facebook to directly reach voters with the exact messages they cared most about – infrastructure key among them -- and had handpicked Republican Facebook employees to guide him.

"Twitter is how [Trump] talked to the people, Facebook was going to be how he won," Parscale tells Stahl. Parscale says he used the majority of his digital ad budget on Facebook ads and explained how efficient they could be, particularly in reaching the rural vote. "So now Facebook lets you get to…15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for," says Parscale. And people anywhere could be targeted with the messages they cared about. "Infrastructure…so I started making ads that showed the bridge crumbling…that's micro targeting…I can find the 1,500 people in one town that care about infrastructure. Now, that might be a voter that normally votes Democrat," he says. 

Parscale says the campaign would average 50-60,000 different ad versions every day, some days peaking at 100,000 separate iterations – changing design, colors, backgrounds and words – all in an effort to refine ads and engage users. Parscale received help utilizing Facebook's technology from Facebook employees provided by the company who showed up for work to his office multiple days a week. He says they had to be partisan and he questioned them to make sure. "I wanted people who supported Donald Trump." Parscale calls these Facebook employees "embeds" who could teach him every aspect of the technology. "I want to know everything you would tell Hillary's campaign plus some," he says he told them. 

Both campaigns used Facebook's advertising technology extensively to reach voters, but Parscale says the Clinton campaign didn't go as far as using "embeds." "I had heard that they did not accept any of [Facebook's] offers."

Okay now all of this is perfectly legal of course, but here's the thing, all of this time investigators have been wondering HOW the Russians knew so much about American politics that it allowed them to specifically target Facebook users who would be open to their manipulation.

It has been speculated that they may have had Americans helping them.

Well what better American help would they need than actual Facebook experts already helping the Trump campaign?

Think Progress offers examples of the Russian ads used to attack Hillary and garner support for Trump:


 That's pretty on the nose if you ask me, and it certainly demonstrates a deep understanding of the incredible partisan mistrust that exists in this country.

This of course does not prove collusion, but it must certainly open up a new field of inquiry for Robert Mueller and his team.

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:26 PM

    Sorry....o/t but Dakota is itching to take out this Dan B. guy. Seems to think this guy gave out Bristol’s phone # & she’s getting crank calls. He wants to go head-to-head with this guy. Stay tuned....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous3:18 PM

      Two stolen valor fucktards being retarded, surprised? Not so much.

      Delete
  2. Anonymous1:31 PM

    http://www.politicususa.com/2017/10/07/corrupt-trump-explodes-finds-companies-allowed-pay-bribes.html

    " He began fulminating about federal laws that prohibit American businesses from bribing officials overseas; the businesses, he said, were being unfairly penalized.”

    The exchange between Trump and Tillerson illustrates that the President Of The United States wants to encourage corruption. Trump has no ethical or moral compass. He doesn’t see why it is illegal for US companies to be handing out bribes."

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous1:33 PM

    http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/10/06/possible_british_lawsuit_could_reveal_how_cambridge_analytica_targeted_voters.html

    "Trump campaign chief and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was on the board of Cambridge Analyitica. The company’s primary financier is Robert Mercer, the secretive billionaire CEO of the New York investment firm Renaissance Technologies, who is also one of the main funders of Bannon’s Breitbart News. The family has also funded Milo Yiannopoulos, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. And Mercer was the largest donor to Trump-backing Super PACs during the election, period."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous3:17 PM

    It's a brave new world and social media is a huge part of it. If people are no longer able to think for themselves, mostly due to content-feeding from social media, then all I can say is welcome to the way things will be for the vast, foreseeable future.

    This is it folks and it won't be changing anytime soon. Either embrace it, be smart enough to not be duped or stay away from it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous6:03 AM

    I have never ever been a fan of facebook, twitter, classmates.
    Like everything else for profit it was unleashed first to the innocent young usa citizens and then global citizen. It was a nerd experiment by a nerd for a nerd. It was a tool for many good causes. And now it is a criminal tool used to brainwash, murder, abuse, harass, stalk and harm our children, friends, family, business, and country. We cannot allow this, nor cell phones from china causing brain tumors, Social and Screen distractions while driving, Unchecked gun buyers and owners, fracking earthquakes and
    trumps and his so called government employees stealing our tax dollars and misusing our money and agencies. Time to rise and shine and remove this social disease and filth from the White House and US Presidency. Change.

    These are things the American consumers fought to avoid by living under laws, rules, regulations. A civil society of fairness and justice. Trumps silent swamp of deplorable's have surfaced like turds and leeches in a septic system. And greedy nerdy facebook helped.

    ReplyDelete

Don't feed the trolls!
It just goes directly to their thighs.