The 2020 election is anything but normal; Donald Trump is running for reelection, Joe Biden is trying to navigate through his many tensions with the left, and we still don’t know if Kanye West is actually even in the picture. The 2016 election was also, to say the least, quite extraordinary; but, some if its abnormalities will not be carrying into 2020.
“The Great Hack”, a documentary directed by Karim Amer and and Jehane Noujaim, exposed and investigated election tactics used last year by the Trump administration in 2016, which involved a data company called Cambridge Analytica targeting swing voters by purposefully bombarding their feeds with conservative advertisements. In 2018, the company ceased to exist due to the fact that they conducted the largest data breach that has ever happened in occurrence with Facebook.
Many believe that the Trump administration’s work with Cambridge Analytica greatly influenced the outcome of the election in 2016 and that it may be possible that without the interference, Clinton may be our president right now.
Now, many firms are boycotting Facebook ads and are refusing to advertise their products for the time being. However, this is taking place in response to Facebook’s failure to effectively meet their standards of addressing some of the racist content on their website. In light of everything that’s been going on recently, of course, advocacy groups are taking the matter incredibly seriously, as are many companies.
While Facebook is debating whether or not they’re going to actually ban political advertisements off the website, the boycott is directly addressing misinformation and complacency.
Mark Zuckerberg has lost a whopping 7 billion dollars.
