An internal Facebook report issued right after the 2016 election may hold some keys to finding out if Russia helped the Trump campaign's digital effort.
The company's data scientists concluded the president's team made better use of the social network, focusing on specifics such as strategy and volume of ads.
The paper, obtained by Bloomberg and discussed here for the first time, describes in granular detail the difference between Trump’s campaign, which was focused on finding new donors, and Clinton’s campaign, which concentrated on ensuring Clinton had broad appeal ...
Trump ran 5.9 million different versions of ads during the presidential campaign and rapidly tested them to spread those that generated the most Facebook engagement, according to the paper. Clinton ran 66,000 different kinds of ads in the same period.
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A former Facebook employee cited the information from the white paper in a memo to Representative Adam Schiff’s office in early March, saying it could help Congress ask the right questions about whether the campaign coordinated with Russia. For example, according to the paper, more than a quarter of Trump’s ad spending was tied to third-party data files on voters, and leveraged a Facebook tool that helped the campaign show ads to people who looked similar to the names on file. Clinton’s ads aimed for broader audiences, with only 4 percent of her Facebook spend on the lookalike tool.
“Did Russian operatives give the Trump campaign a list of names to include or exclude from advertising that was running on Facebook?” the former employee asked in the memo.
Republicans shut down the House of Representatives’ investigation into Russia and Trump days later, “leaving questions unanswered, leads unexplored, countless witnesses uncalled, subpoenas unissued,” Schiff, a California Democrat, wrote on Twitter ...
But Congress is still focusing on the use of third-party information on Facebook for another reason: the company’s ensuing crisis over data on 50 million users obtained by Cambridge Analytica, a political advertising firm that helped Trump’s campaign. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is set to make his first congressional testimony on the issue in a matter of days.
One key question Zuckerberg is likely to face, raised in the former employee’s memo to Schiff: What lists of Facebook users did Trump’s campaign upload for advertising purposes?
Trump’s Campaign Said It Was Better at Facebook. Facebook Agrees (Bloomberg Politics)