Political strategists say they combine information from multiple databases to identify the people they want to vote—and not vote. Photograph: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images Facebook said on Wednesday it will temporarily suspend political advertising after Election Day, November 3. It’s the latest in a series of moves by the social media giant to limit the manipulation that marked the 2016 presidential campaign. But researchers and political strategists say campaigns can still use Facebook to target the voters that they do—and don’t—want to vote. The UK’s Channel 4 last month reported that President Trump’s 2016 campaign used data from Cambridge Analytica and other sources to identify Black voters who they thought could be dissuaded from voting. To do that, the campaign identified groups of users as Black, as voters, as living in swing states, and, finally, as persuadable. They flooded their Facebook feeds with negative ads. Facebook’s complex advertising system is able to synthesize data from different sources to identify these traits in users and direct targeted messages at them. “I’ve been in the political advertising space now for almost 10 years,” says Andy Amsler, director of paid media for the marketing firm Precision Strategies. “When I entered it, I could […]

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