2020 race: Digital bid to keep black voters at home in 2016

Donald Trump’s digital campaign team tried to dissuade millions of African-Americans from voting in the 2016 election.

African-Americans are by and large loyal to the Democratic Party and would have voted for Hillary Clinton. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump’s digital campaign team tried to dissuade millions of African-Americans from voting in the 2016 US presidential election, Britain’s Channel 4 News channel alleged in a report broadcast on Monday night.

The channel’s investigative journalists said they had got hold of a file used by Mr Trump’s team four years ago that contains close to 200 million US voters who were put into different categories in order to send them targeted ads on social media.

Among those, more than 3.5 million black Americans were allegedly put into a category dubbed “deterrence” that aimed to push them to abstain from voting.

Channel 4 journalists said ­African-Americans, who are by and large loyal to the Democratic party and would have voted for Hillary Clinton, were targeted by this strategy more than other communities. In the state of Georgia, for instance, black people made up 61 per cent of members of the “dissuasion” category when they represent 32 per cent of the population, according to the investigation. “It was a strategy that preceded a collapse in the black vote in key states like Wisconsin,” the report said.

Mr Trump’s digital campaign had included a team from British firm Cambridge Analytica, accused of having collected and used personal data of Facebook users without their consent for political purposes.

Brad Parscale, the campaign’s 2016 digital director, insisted that his team did not target black voters. “I would say I’m nearly 100 per cent sure we did not run any campaigns that targeted even African-Americans,” he told PBS Frontline.

AFP