Top Facebook exec says Trump ran the best digital ad campaign ever in 2016
- Facebook Vice President Andrew "Boz" Bosworth said the company was responsible for getting President Donald Trump elected in the 2016 U.S. election because "he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser."
- In his memo, Bosworth touches on Trump, Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and the March 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.
- Bosworth called Cambridge Analytica "pure snake oil and we knew it."
Facebook Vice President Andrew "Boz" Bosworth said the company was responsible for getting President Donald Trump elected in the 2016 U.S. election because "he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser."
Bosworth, who heads Facebook's hardware group today but was overseeing the ads organization during the election, made his comments in a 2,500-word December memo to his employee that was first obtained by and published by the New York Times on Tuesday. In the memo, Bosworth touches on a variety of topics including Trump, Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and Cambridge Analytica, a data firm improperly accessed the data of 87 million Facebook users and used it to target ads for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
Bosworth, who oversaw wrote he believes Facebook did tip the 2016 election to Trump, but not because of Russian interference or misinformation -- simply because Trump's campaign used Facebook's advertising tools better than anybody else had.
"Trump just did unbelievable work," Bosworth wrote. "They weren't running misinformation or hoaxes. They weren't microtargeting or saying different things to different people. They just used the tools we had to show the right creative to each person."
In his post, Bosworth also called Cambridge Analytica "pure snake oil and we knew it."
"At the time we thought they were just another company trying to find an angle to promote themselves and assumed poor performance would eventually lose them their clients," he wrote. "We had no idea they were shopping an old Facebook dataset that they were supposed to have deleted (and certified to us in writing that they had)."
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