32 MARCH 2020
James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched
to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale’s political
in experience made him open to experimenting with the plat-
form’s new tools. “Whereas some grizzled campaign strategist
who’d been around the block a few times might say, ‘Oh, that
will never work,’ Brad’s predisposition was to say, ‘Yeah, let’s try
it.’ ” From June to November, Trump’s campaign ran 5.9 million
ads on Facebook, while Clinton’s ran just 66,000. A Facebook
exec utive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump “got
elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve
ever seen from any advertiser.”
Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actu-
ally mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump’s surprise victory.
Stories appeared in the press calling him a “genius” and the cam-
paign’s “secret weapon,” and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the
entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a
sign that the president’s 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital
tactics that Parscale had mastered.
Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a prefer-
ence for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of
donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When
a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading
details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. “When I
give a speech, I tell it like a story,” he said. “My story is my story.”
DISINFORMATION
ARCHITECTURE
In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher
at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Fili-
pino political consultant he calls “P.” In college, P had studied
the “Little Albert experiment,” in which scientists conditioned a
young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises
every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave
P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos
to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the
groups got big enough—about 100,000 members—he began
posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave
comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The
pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy
theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.
Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were
designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential
candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug crim-
inals. (Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode
through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug
dealers.) P’s experiment was one plank in a larger “dis information
architecture”—which also included social-media influencers paid
to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of
former call centers—that experts say aided Duterte’s rise to power.
Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up
these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.
The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerg-
ing propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old
ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in
this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably
compared their methods of disinformation to “an invisible radia-
tion” that takes effect while “the population doesn’t even feel it
is being acted upon.”) But with the technological advances of
the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones,
governments around the world have found success deploying
Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.
In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression
as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the
people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these
tactics. They may use gentler terminology— muddy the waters;
alternative facts—but they’re building a machine designed to
exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.
Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting—
the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and
then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages.
The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for
defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from
a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to
800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its recep-
tion will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout
their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows
them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized
messages in their ear.
Parscale didn’t invent this practice—Barack Obama’s cam-
paign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton’s followed suit. But
Trump’s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and
its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example,
Trump’s team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in
Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, “Hillary
Thinks African- Americans Are Super Predators.” An unnamed
campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was
one of “three major voter suppression operations underway.” (The
other two targeted young women and white liberals.)
The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large
part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began
as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital
psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it
worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it
circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.
The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Rob-
ert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon
as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered
from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—
Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed “psychographic
profiles” for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting
with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain
personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men
whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mex-
ican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up ques-
tion designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political
correct ness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”
Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cam-
bridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Con-
gress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who