The Advertising of Facebook, And not the Russian hackers, Made Trump president

Last more than a year since the election of Donald Trump as president of the US, the role that Facebook played during the 2016 campaign is still being examined. The dynamics of social networks and advertising caught many experts by surprise, who suddenly saw Trump dominate the digital conversation until he won.

Although it has already been discussed at length, without too many conclusions beyond the algorithm of Facebook needed and still needs a good patch , the comments of key players during the elections shed a little more light on how it came to such a situation of inequality between Clinton and Trump in terms of presence in networks.

A Wired article written by a former head of Facebook monetization sheds more light on how Trump did not need Russian help in promoting his network campaign for a simple fact: his messages got higher response rate (comments, likes, shared and similar), which together with that pursued a more delocalized audience and with a simpler format, considerably cheapened their advertising spending.

This is a trick with which Hillary Clinton did not count . The Democratic candidate had to face much higher prices for network advertising, which meant fewer users saw it and, in addition, at a higher cost for their campaign.

It is something that has come to corroborate one of Trump's main advisors during the campaign, Brad Parscale. Quoting the director of Wired, Parscale assured that its CPM ( the price to pay for thousand impressions in Facebook ) was equivalent to cents and that, in comparison with Hillary, it should be 100 or 200 times cheaper.

This is something that has also confirmed the former director of communications campaign Hillary Clinton, Jennifer Palmieri.

However, they have not been slow to appear several voices that contradicted directly what was said by Parscale. Palmieri wanted to clarify and, in statements to The Washington Post, only 'supports' the second part of the statement by Parscale, that "Trump was a perfect candidate for Facebook."

Who has tried to completely disassemble Parscale has been Andrew Bosworth, former vice president of advertising for Facebook. According to him, the advertising auction system is not discriminatory and works like any more traditional advertising business : by types of audience.

At the same time, he has provided a diagram with the costs of the campaigns of Trump and Clinton during the key moments of the campaign (between June and November) that would otherwise just the opposite: Clinton paid less for his publicity.

The complex and cryptic of this whole thing is that Facebook does not share almost any statistics of its advertising and it is difficult to believe both a former manager of the company and a publicist who has used (successfully) to promote something in this case, a presidential candidate like Trump.

Until now, Russian agents had been blamed and persecuted, who had run advertisements on Facebook and generated headers of incendiary and false news as the main actors in disrupting the digital conversation around Trump and Clinton, but this new information would point directly to the operation of advertising on Facebook as responsible for the imbalance between candidates on the platform.

With this new information on the table, it follows that what Trump earned with a dollar on Facebook had nothing to do with what Clinton obtained on the same platform . This is especially noticeable in rural areas, where Trump had more traction and in which the advertising cost, both in Facebook and in other formats, was much lower than in Clinton's areas of influence.

The Russian interference is being investigated and has led research committees to large positions of both Google and Facebook, who are blamed for not monitoring the information that is hosted on their platforms.

These new revelations put on the table again two issues that Facebook can not solve : that it needs to be more transparent in how its advertising is managed, something that has been demanded in the past in countless times: and that it must reconsider the effectiveness of its algorithms , which are guided by the virality of the contents regardless of whether they are about politics, cute cats or cooking recipes.

Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions about this news.