The Trump campaign on Wednesday lashed out at Facebook after company executives said they were considering changes to rules around political ads that could affect the campaign’s ability to target its supporters on the platform.
The outcry came as Trump’s re-election team has undertaken a massive spending blitz on Facebook aimed at countering the House’s impeachment inquiry. Trump’s page alone promoted more than $830,000 worth of ads in the seven days ending on Nov. 17, according to Facebook’s ad archive.
Facebook’s microtargeting technologies allow advertisers to hone in on specific groups of users and deliver messaging tailored to them — a strategy the Trump campaign has used prolifically. Trump’s campaign director Brad Parscale has noted that the president’s team has tested thousands of variations of political ads in an attempt to reach small groups of voters, such as “15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for.”
The prospect that his re-election campaign could lose access to some of those tools appears to be vexing his team. The campaign’s official Twitter account used siren emojis to sound the alarm, tagging Facebook’s account on Twitter as it warned that the company “wants to take important tools away from us for 2020.”
The disapproval came in response to revelations that Facebook executives were considering broad changes to advertising rules, even as they have declined to follow Twitter’s lead in washing their hands of the issue by banning ads from political candidates altogether.
Facebook and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did Google, where executives also are considering changes in the rules for political ads on YouTube, a video-streaming site where Trump also has attacked Democrats during the impeachment debate.
Facebook has faced a torrent of criticism this fall after affirming that it would not fact-check speech by politicians, arguing that it should not serve as the arbiter of truth online. Sparking that controversy was one of the Trump campaign’s own ads, which assailed former Vice President Joe Biden with false claims about his dealings in Ukraine. Biden, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, requested that Facebook remove the ad — and the social media giant declined.
In the weeks since, Trump has continued to make false claims in Facebook ads, including the assertion that the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller resulted in a “total exoneration,” which it did not.
Many of the campaign’s most recent posts take aim at Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pressing users to contribute to Trump’s campaign to signal their opposition to the “Fake Impeachment Trials” and the “Impeachment Hoax.”
