Although Facebook claims it is not biased politically, the company labels every user as liberal, moderate or conservative, even if they do not post or comment about politics, the New York Times reports.
The easiest way for a user to determine how Mark Zuckerberg’s company labels his or her political leanings is to visit the “ad preferences” page at facebook.com/ads/preferences. The user then scrolls down the preference list and clicks on “interests” and then the “Lifestyle and Culture” grouping. Next, the user can scroll down and click the box for “U.S. Politics,” and the user will learn how Facebook characterizes his or her interests as liberal, moderate of conservative.
Facebook does give users the opportunity to make their own political determinations, by going to Facebook’s “About Me” preference and stating Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Given that Facebook wants to know users’ deepest secrets so they can sell them to anyone willing to pay, Mark Zuckerberg and his posse will categorize users as hard-core liberals by their affinity for brands like “Tom’s of Maine,” or hard-core conservatives if they crave Chick-fil-A.
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have developed the type of extensive dossiers on 1.7 billion worldwide users that the East German Stassi would have craved. Political campaign managers pay higher fees to Facebook for “optimizing” the effectiveness of their political ads.
Federal campaign spending reports show that Donald Trump only shelled out about $20 million for television advertising in July, compared to the $300 million spent by Hillary Clinton in July. But Trump did spend $8.4 million on the San Antonio, Texas digital marketing firm of Giles-Parscale. According to a report by the Times, Trump is focused on targeting politically moderate Facebook users.
One of the reasons Democrats have spent so little on digital strategies is the tremendous support they have been receiving from Silicon Valley social media giants. Hillary Clinton only spent $132,500 for online advertising in July with Washington, D.C.-based Bully Pulpit Interactive.
But after having to admit earlier this year that some former Facebook employees that “curated” content had been biased against conservatives, Mark Zuckerberg promised the company would retrain employees and impose new “controls and oversight” to cut bias. As a result, Facebook stopped allowing the liberal New York Times, CNN, NBC News, Washington Post and BuzzFeed to dominate rating the importance of stories.
Super PACs supporting Clinton are now developing big digital strategies to counter Trump. “USA Action” claims it will spend $35 million online and “Correct the Record” is putting up $1 million, according to the San Jose Business Journal.