British network reveals damning data leak about Trump 2016 campaign and Black voters

A massive data leak obtained by Channel 4 news (a British network, now famous for its investigative work on the Cambridge Analytica story) claims that Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign identified over 3 million Black American voters as people they wanted to keep away from the polls on Election Day. According to this report, Trump’s digital campaign essentially created files on millions of Americans and, using an algorithm, broke them down into categories, also known as “audiences.” In the case of Black voters, for example, about 3.5 million were allegedly put into the “deterrence” category. In fact, the “deterrence” group was reportedly mostly people of color, including Hispanic, Asian, and “other” groups. 

Based on the leak, it appears that this campaign effort homed in on 16 key swing states, including Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Now, it’s not possible to determine precisely how effective these methods may or may not have been for reasons we can explore below, but the leak itself is pretty damning regardless. Let’s breakdown what Channel 4 dug up below.

You might be thinking: Well, doesn’t everyone use data on voters? Sure. But, as Jamal Watkins, the vice president of the National Association for the Advanced of Colored People (NAACP) told Channel 4 on the matter, the idea is to use voter data to encourage people to vote, not to suppress them. 

“We don’t use the data to say who can we deter and keep at home,” Watkins told the outlet. “That just seems, fundamentally, it’s a shift from the notion of democracy.”

The White House, the Trump campaign, and the Republican National Committee have declined to issue any comment on the matter so far. But we do know that the Trump campaign drops some major money into advertising, especially advertising on Facebook. Major money to the tune of $44 million in 2016 alone, in fact. And, even now, Trump’s reelection campaign drops enormous money on advertising on the platform. 

So, what were those ads? Can we review them now? Well, no. Facebook didn’t keep a political ad library at that point (it does now), and Trump’s campaign had an enormous number of ads, including, per Channel 4, ads that may have disappeared from user feeds once the campaign stopped paying for them. Facebook also hasn’t clarified what ads were used in the months leading up to the November 2016 election. So how many people in the “deterrence” category were possibly targeted, and in what way? We really don’t know. But we know voters deserve answers.