Trump's campaign is poised to replicate its 2016 success on Facebook, exploiting how FB's AI ad tools automatically distribute ad spend and target audiences
Look at a thousand of the millions of Facebook ads Donald Trump has run, and it's hard to believe that they represent a winning strategy. Tweets: @therealquags , @brianweeden , @antoniogm , @larryrosenthal , @venkatananth , @signaljams , @pernillet , @robhorning , @zagrrl , @ibogost , @moonalice , @whotargetsme , @justinhendrix , and @kevinroose Tweets: Quags / @therealquags : I think this is a great piece but boy oh boy, are we really at the point where we're comfortable saying “the advertising is working so well that we have no idea how it's working”? https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... @brianweeden : This, from an excellent piece on how Facebook advertising has changed presidential campaigns https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... @antoniogm : @biosi @ibogost @TheAtlantic @alexismadrigal Huh, interesting. Well...discussion of FB ads has certainly improved since the last election. This is more accurate than anything published in 2016. Larry Rosenthal / @larryrosenthal : @ibogost @alexismadrigal good stuff... Facebook combined with gaming systems that Bannon learned about from IGE made for a horrible reality/. one i warned about for over a decade. Facebook VR Horizons is the next big question Venkat Ananth / @venkatananth : This is an excellent deep dive into Facebook's AI-based advertising machinery and how and why it works out for the Trump campaign. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... #longreads @signaljams : @ibogost @alexismadrigal its amazing that entire article failed to mention the one piece of software that enabled them to connect the voter database to facebook. Pernille Tranberg / @pernillet : Donald Trump won the presidency by using Facebook's advertising machinery. He's poised to do it again. And politicians all over the world are using the same machine undermining their own democracies 🤔 https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Rob Horning / @robhorning : today I wrote a bit about this piece on Facebook's ad tech, which I think shows not that FB ads are novel but they are the apotheosis of advertising works, not through persuasive content but by fashioning ad-receptive subjects https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Dr Gail Barnes / @zagrrl : Advertising now means training a tech behemoth's artificial intelligence to assemble the right audience from the scattered fragments of potentially similar ones. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Ian Bogost / @ibogost : Facebook is extremely hard to grasp. That's why @alexismadrigal and I compare its AI to an alien being, like the heptapods in Arrival. But you'll never grasp what Facebook does to democracy, and society, if you only look at the people who build or use it. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Roger McNamee / @moonalice : Brilliant work by @ibogost and @alexismadrigal on how Facebook works for the Trump campaign. Must read. It drives me crazy that after nearly four years this is not better understood. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Who Targets Me / @whotargetsme : “How Facebook Works For Trump” by @ibogost and @alexismadrigal in @TheAtlantic. Includes lots of good detail on how the machine works - at least as far as anyone knows how the machine works. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... @justinhendrix : How Facebook Works for Trump: Donald Trump won the presidency by using the social network's advertising machinery in exactly the way the company wanted. He's poised to do it again, report @alexismadrigal and @ibogost: https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : This piece really gets at a thing I think about all the time. We talk about “runaway AI” in the future tense, but undersupervised AI (in the form of Facebook ads and YouTube recommendations, etc.) has already changed society, in ways we'll be feeling and unpacking for years.
Context & Ripple Effects
This story closes a loop that opened in early 2018, when reporting showed how the Trump campaign increased its Facebook ad purchasing power by mastering tools like Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences and pairing them with provocative creative. By January 2020 the scale was visible: an investigation found the campaign had spent roughly $20M on more than 218,000 ads, many aimed at conservatives with data-harvesting ploys.
What changed by April 2020 is who does the targeting — less the campaign's operatives, more Facebook's own AI ad machinery, which automatically distributes spend and assembles audiences. That shift lands just as researchers report Facebook has weakened or disabled the tools they use to track political ads, leaving outside observers with even less visibility into how the money moves.
First-order effects
- The Trump campaign gets cheaper, self-optimizing reach: Facebook's algorithms allocate budget and build target segments, so the campaign scales thousands of ad variants without hand-tuning each one — the same mechanics behind the 218K-ad volume documented earlier in 2020.
- Facebook becomes the de facto arbiter of which voters see which political messages, since its automated delivery system — not the advertiser — decides placement and audience assembly.
Second-order effects
- Opposing campaigns face pressure to run the same automated playbook rather than compete on manual targeting, because a rival whose spend self-optimizes inside Facebook's auction gains a structural cost advantage per persuasion impression.
- With researcher tracking tools degraded, journalists and academics lose the ability to audit this ad operation independently, shifting accountability onto Facebook's own disclosures — the same transparency gap that later surfaced in internal findings about troll-farm reach before the election.
Third-order effects
- If algorithmic ad delivery keeps outpacing external oversight, US elections move toward a structure where a single platform's optimization systems effectively set the terms of political persuasion — and regulators are left auditing outcomes they cannot observe in real time.
- The pattern extends beyond one campaign: any actor that learns to feed provocative creative into automated distribution — domestic campaigns or foreign operations like the Eastern European troll farms Facebook later quantified internally — can rent the same amplification machinery.
The trend: Political advertising is consolidating around platforms' own AI-driven delivery systems, where targeting decisions migrate from campaign staff to opaque recommendation algorithms faster than oversight can follow.