A top Facebook executive credited the company’s advertising policies with putting President Trump in the White House and predicted they may help him win a second term in 2020.
Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a vice president at Facebook who previously led the company’s ad division, indicated in an internal memo leaked Tuesday that he personally believes the social networking service played a significant part in Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 over former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks,” Mr. Bosworth wrote to colleagues. “He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.
“That brings me to the present moment, where we have maintained the same ad policies,” Mr. Bosworth wrote. “It occurs to me that it very well may lead to the same result. As a committed liberal I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result.”
The longtime Facebook exec suggested the social networking service will unlikely take action to thwart Mr. Trump’s odds of reelection, however.
“As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear,” he said.
Mr. Bosworth posted the memo last month, making it publicly available on his Facebook page after excerpts were cited this week by The New York Times.
“It wasn’t written for public consumption,” Mr. Bosworth wrote about the leaked memo, adding that he hoped sharing it would “encourage my coworkers to continue to accept criticism with grace as we accept the responsibility we have overseeing our platform.”
Facebook declined to comment.
Mr. Trump’s election campaign spent about $44 million on Facebook ads during the final six months of the 2016 election, while Mrs. Clinton’s campaign spent roughly $28 million during that same span, an internal Facebook document obtained by Bloomberg revealed afterward.
The president’s official Facebook page has spent more than $27 million on ads since May 2018, including more than a half-million dollars spent within just the past week, according to Facebook statistics.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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