THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 51
Project Alamo staffers also experi-
mented with what are commonly known
as “dark posts”—Facebook ads that can
be targeted to specific, often small, groups
of people. Dark posts were not illegal,
nor did they violate Facebook’s terms of
service, but they were controversial, be-
cause they skirted conventions of trans-
parency. In the past, the thinking went,
a campaign that chose to run a racist ad
would at least suffer blowback from the
many nonracists who saw it; in the era
of microtargeting, when a racist ad could
be served only to people whose online
behavior demonstrated a proclivity to-
ward racism, that check was gone.
Tw o Bloomberg Businessweek report-
ers visited Project Alamo shortly before
the 2016 election. Parscale posed for a
photo while hunched over his laptop; on
the wall behind him were a “Bikers for
Trump” poster, a novelty dollar bill with
Trump’s face on it, and an inspirational
quote falsely attributed to Lincoln. Par-
scale told the reporters, “I always won-
der why people in politics act like this
stuff is so mystical. It’s the same shit we
use in commercial, just has fancier names.”
In their piece, the reporters quoted a
“senior official” within the campaign as
saying, “We have three major voter-
suppression operations under way.” The
targets of those operations were said to
be “idealistic white liberals, young women,
and African Americans.” In common
parlance, “voter suppression” refers to a
narrow set of tactics that are openly rac-
ist, unconstitutional, or both (see Geor-
gia in 1960—or in 2018, when its secre-
tary of state was elected governor after
purging several thousand people, many
of them African-American, from the
voter rolls). But the term can also apply
to traditional negative advertising in-
tended to dampen enthusiasm for an op-
ponent. Trump’s use of such negative
campaigning, enhanced by the latest in
targeting technology, seems to have
helped: if African-American turnout in
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin
had been as high as it was in 2008, Clin-
ton might have won. (Parscale has re-
peatedly denied that any such operations
took place. “I would actually say we ran
the least amount of negative ads I’ve ever
seen in a Presidential campaign,” he said.)
Clinton had a budget of more than
a billion dollars, a significant chunk of
which was spent on TV ads. Trump’s
campaign budget was more than thirty
per cent smaller, but he invested more
money in Facebook ads, and those ads
cost him much less, on average, thanks
to the platform’s instant-auction system,
which rewards viral success. “A canny
marketer with really engaging (or out-
raging) content can goose their effec-
tive purchasing power at the ads auc-
tion,” Antonio García Martínez, a
former Facebook employee, wrote for
Wired in 2018. Parscale responded to
Martínez’s piece on Twitter: “This is
why @realDonaldTrump was a perfect
candidate for Facebook.”O
f all the benefits the Trump cam-
paign reaped from social media,
surely the most potent came in the form
of free human labor. “I asked Facebook,
‘I want to spend a hundred million dol-
lars on your platform. Send me a man-
ual,’” Parscale said to “Frontline.” “They
say, ‘We don’t have a manual.’ I say, ‘Well,
send me a human manual, then.’”
In June of 2016, Facebook dispatched
what is often called an “embed.” He wasa young man from its ad-sales depart-
ment who had previously worked for
several Republican-affiliated causes. He
spent most of the next four months in
San Antonio, working with the Trump
campaign. Other Facebook employees
rotated through the office on a semi-reg-
ular basis; Google and Twitter also sent
sales reps to the campaign.
“On the commercial side, all big ac-
counts get reps like this,” Tatenda Mu-
sapatike, a former Facebook sales rep, told
me. “It’s standard. Coca-Cola gets a Face-
book rep, working on commission, whose
job is to advocate for Coca-Cola within
Facebook, and vice versa.” Sales reps were
taught that the more useful they were to
clients, the more money those clients were
apt to spend. “Managers would always
talk about ‘earning the badge,’ ” she con-
tinued. “As in, you’re so tightly aligned
with your client that they think of you as
part of their team, and they give you a
security badge to get in and out of the
building.” In a 2017 paper in the journal
Political Communication, Daniel Kreiss
and a fellow communications scholar,“Only one of us can be ‘the funny one.’ ”