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Donald Trump’s campaign for the 2016 U.S. presidential election has been accused of actively seeking to deter 3.5 million black Americans in battle states from voting by deliberately targeting them with negative Hillary Clinton Facebook ads.
The secret effort focused on 16 swing states, several of which Trump narrowly won after the collapse of the black Democratic vote.
The claims come from a Channel 4 News investigation, which leaked a copy of a vast electoral database that it says was used by the Trump campaign in 2016.
The investigation, which includes the records of 198 million Americans and contains details about their national and economic situation acquired from market research firms, claimed that voters were segmented into eight categories.
One was marked as “deterrence”. Those placed in the special category – voters believed likely to vote for Clinton or not vote at all – were disproportionately black.
According to the investigation, the goal of the Trump campaign was to dissuade them from backing the Democrat entirely, targeting them with “obscure ads” on their Facebook feeds, which harshly attacked Clinton and, in some cases, argued that she was not sympathetic to the Democrats. African American.
The effort is said to have been designed in part by Cambridge Analytica, the notorious election consultancy that went public last year following revelations that it used dirty tricks to help win elections around the world and had gained unauthorized access to dozens of millions of Facebook profiles.
In Michigan, a state that Trump won by 10,000 votes, 15% of the voters are black. But they accounted for 33% of the special deterrence category in the secret database, meaning that black voters were apparently disproportionately targeted by anti-Clinton ads.
In Wisconsin, where Republicans won by 30,000, 5.4% of voters are black, but 17% of the deterrent group. According to Channel 4, that amounted to more than a third of black voters in the state as a whole, all placed in the group to receive anti-Clinton material on their Facebook feeds.
Attack ads that were used by Trump’s digital campaign included one known as the “super predator” commercial, which featured a video clip of controversial comments made by Clinton in 1996, which Republicans said referred to African Americans.
Arguing that it was necessary to “have an organized effort against gangs,” and their members, Clinton said: “They are often the kind of kids who call themselves super predators: no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, But first, we have to put them on their guard ”.
The Democrat apologized for using those words shortly after being confronted by Black Lives Matter activists about them in February 2016, but the language was picked up by Trump during the campaign and largely recycled online.
Another attack announcement reportedly came from a political action committee also led by Cambridge Analytica. It features a young black woman who appears to be a Clinton supporter who abandons her script to say, “I just don’t believe what I’m saying.”
When she is reminded that she is an actress, she responds that she is “not that good” as an actress.
Jamal Watkins, vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said it was shocking and concerning that there was a covert attempt to suppress the black vote in 2016.
“So we use data, similar to the data in the voter files, but it is to motivate, persuade and encourage people to participate. We do not use the data to say who we can deter and keep at home. That seems, fundamentally, a change of the notion of democracy, ”Watkins told Channel 4.
An estimated 2 million black voters in the United States who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 did not attend Hillary Clinton. In Wisconsin, Trump’s vote equaled Mitt Romney’s in 2012, but Clinton lost because her vote collapsed. The Democrat got 230,000 fewer votes than Obama.
The key to Trump’s victory was discouraging black voters in cities like Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In a city district, where 80% of its 1,440 voters were black, almost half or 44% of the district was marked as a deterrent, a total of 636 people, 90% of whom were black.
Many other factors explained Clinton’s defeat, including legislation that was accused of suppressing the black vote.
Again, in Wisconsin, the Republican-led state has introduced measures that require citizens to present valid voter identification, which it was argued disproportionately affected poor and black voters.
The Trump campaign spent $ 44 million (£ 34 million) on Facebook advertising and generated 6 million ads in total. But the passage of time has meant that only a handful of the attack ads used by the Trump campaign have been recorded, and Facebook won’t say how many or which ads were used at the time.
The company said that “since 2016, the elections have changed and so has Facebook; what happened with Cambridge Analytica could not happen today.” She added that she now has “rules prohibiting voter suppression” and that she was “running the largest voter information campaign in the history of the United States.”
The Trump campaign, the Republican national committee and the White House declined to comment.
A senior Trump campaign official has previously denied any campaign directed against individual groups.
