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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaving The Merrion Hotel in Dublin after a meeting with politicians to discuss regulation of social media and harmful content in April 2019.

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  • We learned this week that the Trump campaign may have tried to dissuade millions of Black voters from voting in 2016 through highly targeted online ads.
  • The investigation, by Channel 4, highlighted a still little-understood online advertising technique, microtargeting.
  • This targets ads at people based on the huge amount of data available about them online.
  • Experts say Big Tech needs to be much more transparent about how microtargeting works, to avoid overblown claims but also counter a potential threat to democracy.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

The Trump campaign in 2016 used online ads to try and dissuade Black voters from voting, according to an investigation this week by UK broadcaster Channel 4.

A cache

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  • Channel 4 on Monday revealed a leaked cache of data from the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.
  • The data showed how the campaign microtargeted people on Facebook, and labelled a particular group of users as targets for “deterrence” from voting. This group was disproportionately made up of Black users.
  • Experts told Business Insider the report highlights the threat that microtargeting on a vast platform like Facebook’s poses towards democratic elections.
  • “Facebook talks a lot about bad actors misusing its platform, but the truth is that the biggest bad actor on Facebook is Facebook,” one said.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

The now-defunct Cambridge Analytica entered the news cycle once again on Monday, four years after its name became synonymous with the huge data scandal that changed the tech landscape forever.

UK broadcaster Channel 4 obtained a leaked data cache from the Trump 2016 presidential campaign which contained the data

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