Now, with the showdown between Trump and President Biden just around the corner, Mehta is changing course.
After years of promoting a range of social media apps as the lifeblood of campaigns; Meta is breaking away from politics. The company will reduce the visibility of politically focused posts and accounts on Facebook and Instagram and impose new rules on political advertisers, long used by politicians to reach potential voters. It messed up the targeting system we had.
A wave of layoffs has gutted the team responsible for coordinating with politicians and campaigns. According to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private personnel matters. This includes foreign-based workers and U.S. employees who have promoted the company’s products to politicians or answered questions from campaigns about the company’s services.
The ad sales team, which was once incorporated into the Trump campaign during the 2016 campaign, is now assuming many of its previous responsibilities, the people said.
Meta’s shift away from current events could transform the campaign’s digital activities and potentially transform the 2024 election. Comparing March 2020 and March 2024, both the Biden and Trump camps saw a 60% decrease. A Washington Post review found that the average engagement per Facebook post is down by double digits on Instagram.
The Trump campaign has analyzed Mehta’s move as an effort to shift the situation in Biden’s favor. Meanwhile, the Biden campaign had already begun shifting its focus online, deploying a cadre of influencers and volunteers to spread its message across private spaces on social networks.
Still, Democrats and Republicans in tight races across the country cannot afford to ignore Facebook, the world’s largest social media network. Political advertising spending on social media is expected to nearly double from $324 million in 2020 to $605 million in 2024, according to estimates from digital analytics firm EMARKETER.
“No other platform can reach so many voters at this scale,” said Eric Wilson, managing partner at Startup Caucus, a Republican campaign technology incubator. “So it would be foolish for the campaign to back away from that.”
Meta spokesperson Dani Lever insisted the changes were in response to user feedback. “These changes are intended to influence what people see because they say they want less political content and more control.” she said. “This approach is built on years of research and can be applied to anyone.”
More than a decade ago, Silicon Valley courted politics.
Mr. Zuckerberg hosted a town hall with President Barack Obama in 2011, which was broadcast live on Facebook. The 2016 presidential debate was streamed on his Facebook Live. Advertising employees keep politicians and campaigns up to date on the company’s latest tools, and were even incorporated into Mr. Trump’s team in 2016.
But following widespread outrage over Russian operatives’ attempts to infiltrate social media to influence the 2016 presidential election, Meta (then known as Facebook) We started reviewing our strategy. The company eliminated fees for political ad salespeople and created a new site to promote tools for politicians across the political spectrum.
The Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, organized in part on Facebook, accelerated this retreat. Shortly after the siege, the company announced it would reduce the amount of political content shown in users’ news feeds.
Three weeks after the attack, Zuckerberg told investors: “People don’t want politics and conflict to take over their experience with our services.”
Meta announced in February that it would stop recommending political content from accounts users don’t follow on Instagram and its upstart text-based app Threads. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri warned last year that he would not “encourage” politics or “hard news” on the platform because threads were not worthy of scrutiny.
This withdrawal affected major news organizations and had a dramatic impact on engagement.
The 25 most cited news organizations in the U.S. lost 75 percent of their total user engagement on Facebook. From the first quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2024, Instagram accounted for 58% of interactions, according to a Post data analysis. Right-wing news organizations such as Newsmax, Daily Wire, Fox News, and Breitbart suffered larger declines on Instagram than mainstream outlets, but no such partisan divide occurred on Facebook, the analysis found. found.
“This is just an interesting moment,” said Natalie Stroud, a social media professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “There seems to be only one pattern. [from news and politics on social media], and that makes me think: where do people go for this information? Or do they just go without it?
Research shows social media attracts “unintended audiences” to current news and increases users’ political knowledge. A 2020 study found that deactivating Facebook during the four weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections reduced users’ factual understanding of news and political polarization.
“Most people don’t really care about politics, so they don’t go out and look for information about politics,” said Joshua Tucker, a professor at New York University who studies social media and politics. “People were using social media platforms for non-political reasons, so they were exposed to more political information.”
Meanwhile, political life is adapting to this new reality. Biden appears to be countering this trend by posting more frequently to his social media accounts, including the official White House page, to increase engagement. According to Post analysis, Biden-related Facebook posts increased from about 300 in March 2020 to more than 600 in March 2024, while Trump’s posts increased from more than 1,000 in March 2020 to more than 600 in 2024. By March 2017, the number had decreased to about 200.
President Trump has dramatically increased his postings on his social network, Truth Social, but has refrained from posting frequently on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sites. Chris Lacivita, a top Trump campaign adviser, likened Mehta’s distancing from politics to a form of shadow banning, where tech companies allow users to post but secretly suppress those who see that content. Ta.
“The public should be concerned and Congress should have questions,” he said. “I think it’s ridiculous if Big Tech thinks they aren’t concerned about Republicans pointing fingers at the scale of organic political discourse.”
By contrast, the Biden campaign entered the 2024 campaign knowing it would be difficult to reach voters online. Instead, campaigns have relied on digital advertising and volunteers to spread information about the president in private digital spaces such as messages and social media groups.
Political campaigns of all kinds are trying to overcome Meta’s ad targeting limitations by using proprietary data and public information like voter registration to customize the ads shown to specific audiences on Facebook. Masu. But attempts to match individual users to voter files aren’t always accurate and don’t fully replace the value meta targeting options once provided campaigns, conservative digital strategists say. Wilson said.
“Facebook knows a lot about its users,” Wilson said. “This is some of the most valuable advertising data in the world… [but it’s not available] It’s for a political movement. ”
Still, in a world where people watch less news and politics in their feeds, these campaign ads may become even more important.
“How can voters learn about the issues at stake in the election?” Wilson asked. “The fact that politics is treated like a four-letter word and banished from public life is ultimately a problem for both sides, and indeed for our democracy in general. think.”
Methodology: The Post used data from CrowdTangle to analyze the Facebook and Instagram engagement of top news organizations and the Trump and Biden campaigns. The Post, with the exception of non-news websites (Wikipedia and presidential campaigns) listed in the 2018 book Network Propaganda by Yochai Benkler and Robert Farris, during the 2016 election. surveyed the 25 media outlets that received the most links from other media sources. And Hal Roberts. The paper also independently investigated regional publications and additional right-wing news outlets to ensure the robustness of its findings regarding partisan influence.
The analysis of campaign posts included accounts in the names of presidential candidates, their running mates, and the campaigns themselves. The Post also separately investigated the official White House pages of President Trump in 2020 and President Biden in 2024.
