The 2016 Trump presidential campaign used ads to try to persuade millions of Black Americans not to vote, according to a Channel 4 report published today.

Channel 4 reported that it had exclusively obtained a 5-terabyte cache of data used by Trump’s campaign. It included information on more than 200 million Americans and included 5,000 files, making it one of the largest leaks to date.

The investigation revealed that in the 16 key battleground states, millions of people were separated into various categories relating to how they might vote and what ads should be tailored to them. One was the “Core Clinton” category, meaning voters who were expected to vote for Hillary Clinton. Another was “GOTV,” which were people who might vote for Trump but would need a push to go to the polls.

Another of the categories was the “Deterrence” category, which has been explained as people the campaign wanted to stay at home and not vote at all.

“The disproportionate categorizing of Black Americans for ‘Deterrence’ is seen across the U.S.,” said Channel 4. “Overall, people of color labelled as Black, Hispanic, Asian and ‘Other’ groups made up 54% of the ‘Deterrence’ category. In contrast, other categories of voters the campaign wished to attract were overwhelmingly white.”

What surfaced after Trump’s win was the fact that his campaign had worked with the British firm Cambridge Analytica to use harvested data to target people with ads. The firm was disbanded later after investigations revealed that millions of people had been targeted without their permission.

The Trump campaign’s $44 million expenditure on Facebook ads was almost double what the Clinton campaign spent. One of those ads was a video of Clinton apparently referring to Black youths as “super predators,” an ad that was allegedly designed to deter people from voting. Some $55,000 was spent on that video in the state of Georgia, where 32% of the population is Black, but 61% of Black people constituted the deterrence category.

Facebook responded to the report, saying that what happened back then won’t happen again because it introduced the Ads Library for more transparency. “We also have rules prohibiting voter suppression and are running the largest voter information campaign in American history,” said the company.

Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, told Variety, not surprisingly, that the report was fake news. “Democrats deterred voters in 2016 by nominating Hillary Clinton, who called Black men ‘super predators,’ and they did it again this year by nominating Joe Biden, who has advocated for racist policies such as the 1994 Crime Bill and even spoke at the funeral of a Klan member,” he said.

Photo: Michael Vadon/Flickr