A 9.8.20 538 piece by Perry Bacon, Jr. says that “polls suggest about 10% of black voters both nationally and in key swing states with large black electorates are supporting Trump.”
I’m wondering if these voters will care one way the other when they read the recently surfaced story from England’s Channel 4 News?
The authors claim to have “exclusively obtained a vast cache of data used by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign on almost 200 million American voters, and that “it reveals that 3.5 million Black Americans were categorized by Trump’s campaign as ‘Deterrence’ – voters they wanted to stay home on election day.”
Excerpt #2: “Civil rights campaigners said the evidence amounted to a new form of voter ‘suppression’ and called on Facebook to disclose ads and targeting information that has never been made public.
“The ‘Deterrence’ project can be revealed after Channel 4 News obtained the database used by Trump’s digital campaign team — credited with helping deliver his shock victory to become president four years ago.
Excerpt #3: “Vast in scale, it contains details on almost 200 million Americans, among more than 5,000 files, which together amass almost 5 terabytes of data — making it one of the biggest leaks in history.
“It reveals not only the huge amounts of data held on every individual voter, but how that data was used and manipulated by models and algorithms.
“In 16 key battleground states, millions of Americans were separated by an algorithm into one of eight categories, also described as ‘audiences’, so they could then be targeted with tailored ads on Facebook and other platforms. One of the categories was named ‘Deterrence’, which was later described publicly by Trump’s chief data scientist as containing people that the campaign “hope don’t show up to vote”.
“In total, 3.5 million Black Americans were marked ‘Deterrence’.”