Facebook ads targeted black audiences for voting “deterrence” | Hacker News Reader

Facebook ads targeted black audiences for voting “deterrence”

channel4.com

66 pointsapsec11232 comments

I'd like to see the documents mentioned that support the claims in the article. Uncited, this is little more than Uncle Fred's facebook posts.

Isn't this the same multi-terabyte leak from 2017?

https://fortune.com/2017/06/19/deep-root-analytics-voter-dat...

Or is this another one?

Why is this flagged?

I call bull all the way around on this. How do you 'target' people to not vote? Seriously, what did they tell them, that the election wasn't happening? That's a giant hole in this story. What kind of ads would you serve those people?

There is historical precedence for billboards and other advertising in black communities giving the wrong date of the election, or telling people only a passport will be taken as ID, etc. It isn’t telling them not to vote but is effectively discouraging or misinforming.

If they had told people the wrong date, or given misinformation about voting requirements, that would have been the headline. But it wasn't. Again, what specifically did they tell these people to deter them from voting? Nothing. Or there would have been a headline about it. This is just speculation.

"vote. It's not going to change anything."

Is that what they said? No. If they had said this, that would have been the headline. It's pure speculation that they were trying to deter these people from voting.

In 2016.

The linked article says it was published on 28 Sep 2020

There are tons of reports from 2016 as well.

It's an article about 2016.

This is the kind of content that makes the top Facebookers fall into split personality disorders. For the business of Facebook, controversial and even hateful content is a massive boon for business as engagement and sharing is an order of magnitude or more than for "fact checked true" stories. So does Facebook allow this to go on and rake in the huge sums of advertising money spent on their platform or risk being accused of Nazi-like censorship by banning such content (and losing all of that ad revenue)?

Quite the conundrum.

One of the charges seems to be that the proportion of black voters chosen for "deterrence" is about twice as large as proportion of black voters in the general population. Given that 92% of black voters voted for a candidate other than Trump[1] and about 50% of all voters voted for a candidate other than Trump, it seems that simply selecting "Democrats" for deterrence explains the outcome, nothing to do with race at all.

Am I missing something here, or is this just a huge misunderstanding of statistics?

[The fact that this database exists and is used at all might be suspect but that seems orthogonal to how the numbers are reported in this story.]

[EDIT: Changed "The charge seems to be" to "One of the charges seems to be". The article contains plenty of charges (the existence of the database at all, for example), besides the statistical aspects.]

[1] https://www.mic.com/articles/159402/here-s-a-break-down-of-h...

> In one confidential document seen by Channel 4 News, Cambridge Analytica admitted the Trump campaign did target “AA” (African Americans) with what it called the “Predators video” – spending $55,000 USD in the state of Georgia alone.

That's not a revelation either. The ad[1] is a series of remarks made by HRC ostensibly denigrating multiple groups, and each remark is labeled with its target: "African-American youth", "millenial voters" [this one was about Bernie supporters], and "Trump voters".

It seems pretty obvious to me (and anyone who saw it?) that an ad like this would be targeted towards the blocs that it's about, which would include black voters and young Bernie supporters, to prevent them from voting Hillary.

[1] https://www.politico.com/video/2016/10/trump-campaign-releas...

The parent comment said "it seems that simply selecting 'Democrats' for deterrence explains the outcome". The article makes it clear that's not the case.

Yes you're right, your comment was clearly in reference to this narrow claim. I didn't intend my comment as a rebuttal to yours, but a bit of a tangent: it's clear that the campaign targeted black voters (presumably among other groups), but it's not clear what's extraordinary or abusive about this. Turnout for oneself and one's opponent is a well-known target of campaign strategy, and I'm not aware of any norm against it. Nor do I think there should be one: it's an entirely legitimate choice to withhold one's vote from either candidate, and this ad simply contained remarks of Clinton's that a black (or Bernie) voter could decide makes her a poor fit for their vote even if they think Trump is too.

To be clear, I meant the statistical outcome specifically. That's why I stated "The charge seems to be that the proportion of black voters chosen for "deterrence" is about twice as large as proportion of black voters in the general population". Admittedly it would have been better to have written "One of the charges seems to be ..." and I have edited my original post to do so.

If the super-predators ad was a central example of the voter deterrence campaign I can’t see why people think it should be stopped. On the continuum between someone voting for one group and someone voting for another group I think a lot of voters will not vote if they don’t significantly prefer one option. This criticism seems to imply if you don’t think your message is good enough to flip someone’s voting intention but good enough they have second thoughts about voting for an alternative then you have a moral obligation to stay silent.

Controlling for party affiliation within the context of a negative ad campaign would've yielded much more interesting results. In all but Wisconsin, this paragraph in particular almost seems counter to their argument with back-of-napkin controls:

> In Georgia, despite Black people constituting 32% of the population, they made up 61% of the ‘Deterrence’ category. In North Carolina, Black people are 22% of the population but were 46% of ‘Deterrence’. In Wisconsin, Black people constitute just 5.4% of the population but made up 17% of ‘Deterrence’.

Right, I too would like to see numbers controlled for party affiliation. I suspect it would look a bit more like this

> In Georgia, despite Black people constituting 60% of Democratic voters, they made up 61% of the ‘Deterrence’ category. In North Carolina, Black people are 40% of the population of Democratic voters but were 46% of ‘Deterrence’. In Wisconsin, Black people constitute just 11% of the population of Democratic voters but made up 17% of ‘Deterrence’.

That the same campaign that did this in 2016 is allowed to be on any ballot at any time after is absolutely incredible.

Look, I'm as happy to complain about Trump and Facebook as the next liberal, but this is a rubbish article, since no examples of these ads from the 2020 campaign were given.

Examples from 2016 ads of Hillary referring to black youths as super-predators[1] were provided, but nothing for 2020.

[1] Has the DNC considered that perhaps, it actually needed to work for the black vote, instead of feeling entitled to it, before nominating her?

The article is about 2016 ads, yes. Doesn't make it "rubbish."

As far as being "entitled," that IS a rubbish argument as Black people vote in the primary, and Biden (for instance) became the nominee in large part due to support from the Black community (to say nothing of his running mate who is also part of the Black community). Arguing that communities don't have any agency when they, in fact, have a disproportionately large role in primaries shows a lack of knowledge of the Democratic party. And generally speaking, ignoring the primary process is an unfortunately common problem with our political discourse. I think both major parties would be better if people paid more attention to the primaries (and nominated better people).

Let's not pretend that the candidates that make it to the primary ballots exist in a vaccum. There was a lot of institutional momentum behind Hillary, which turned out to be entirely misplaced.

She got picked over Sanders - okay, I get it, people voted. (And he isn't exactly a darling of that demographic.) But why was she the DNC front-runner, to begin with?

And when the actual election happened... It resulted in a low voter turnout among the African American community. TFA blames the Trump campaign for it, without stopping for even a moment to think 'Maybe the democratic campaign should have found a better candidate'.

Remember 2008, when, despite the wishes of the DNC, a candidate that did energize the African American community won the primaries?

Is it possible to get this leaked dump? The article says it's from 2016, and I have a few empty 4TB hard drives, so it'd be interesting to load up the data and look through it myself.

On the surface though, if the article is accurate (and I'd want to personally verify it, if the data is available), the idea of labeled a subset of people you advertise to as 'Deterrence' because you have information leading you you believe they'd vote against you, isn't problematic in and of itself.

The article tries to claim there's a link between that label and black voters, but what if they just had selection criteria that assigned that label, and they just happened to be black based on lots of other criteria?

What if there are tons of black people that were marked with a positive label for getting positive ads, because they are black republicans (e.g. they classified them based on posting links to Thomas Sowell, Officer Tatum, Candice Owens, et. al.)

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