A Guardian investigation of 218,100 ads reveals how the campaign’s sophisticated social media machine targets conservative voters
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.