A Guardian investigation of 218,100 ads reveals how the campaign’s sophisticated social media machine targets conservative voters
![One year inside Trumps monumental Facebook campaign](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b968286ad6affebb37117da74350b627099a7fc2/125_0_3750_2250/master/3750.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=3226b968471f8da0fe63a605b7094957)
As the
Democratic candidates for president spent 2019 battling each other in early voting states, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign built a sophisticated social media machine to communicate with conservative voters, grow its email list and fine-tune its messaging.
Over the course of 2019, the
Trump campaign spent nearly $20m on more than 218,000 different
Facebook ads, a new Guardian analysis shows. Among the ads were some of the images and videos that made front-page news for their xenophobic, fear-mongering, vitriolic, and outright false rhetoric.