Facebook is the reason Trump got elected, says Facebook exec who ran advertising during the 2016 election, 'but not for the reasons anyone thinks'
- During the 2016 US presidential election, the Russian government used Facebook and other social networks to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump. Facebook and the Trump campaign have both downplayed that influence in the years since.
- However, in a Facebook internal memo that was leaked to the New York Times this week, Facebook exec Andrew Bosworth said, "Was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes."
- Bosworth was in charge of Facebook advertising during the 2016 campaign. He said Facebook was responsible for getting Trump elected, "but not for the reasons anyone thinks." He pointed to the Trump campaign having run "the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser. Period."
- Bosworth also pointed out that he's "no fan of Trump," and that, after the 2016 election, he "wrote a post about Trump supporters that I'm told caused colleagues who had supported him to feel unsafe around me."
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During the 2016 US election, the Russian government used Facebook and other social media services to influence the election in President Donald Trump's favor.
In the years since, both the Trump campaign and Facebook have downplayed the role that Facebook played in the 2016 election.
But this week, the Facebook executive in charge of the company's advertising arm during the 2016 election offered a different perspective. "Was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected?" Facebook VP Andrew "Boz" Bosworth wrote on Tuesday. "I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks."
Though Russia attempted to influence the election in favor of Trump through various means on Facebook - advertising and fake accounts, among other methods - Bosworth said those attempts weren't particularly effective.
Instead, Bosworth said, "He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser. Period."
Bosworth wrote as much in an internal Facebook message board, but the post was subsequently leaked to The New York Times; as a result, Bosworth published the post in full on his public Facebook page.
In the post, he said that he's "no fan of Trump," and that he "donated the max to Hillary [Clinton]" in the 2016 election. He also said that, following the 2016 election, he "wrote a post about Trump supporters that I'm told caused colleagues who had supported him to feel unsafe around me."
Regardless of his political affiliation, he said, the Trump campaign "did unbelievable work."
In particular, Bosworth called out Brad Parscale, who ran the 2016 Trump campaign's digital efforts.
"They weren't running misinformation or hoaxes. They weren't micro targeting or saying different things to different people," Bosworth wrote. "They just used the tools we had to show the right creative to each person. The use of custom audiences, video, ecommerce, and fresh creative remains the high water mark of digital ad campaigns in my opinion."
Parscale is in charge of the Trump 2020 re-election campaign. He didn't respond immediately to Business Insider's request for comment, but he did respond publicly to Bosworth's post via Twitter. "One of the many lies from the media about the 2016 election," Parscale wrote on Tuesday evening. "Facebook Exec tears it down in a couple sentences."
