The ex-Facebook data expert who helped Trump built a weapon to take him down

tedlistens writes: Whoever wins, the digital political wars aren't going anywhere, and one groupsays it's built the most powerful weapon for persuading voters with Facebook ads, with a hundred experiments, an unparalleled dataset, and a Silicon Valley "dream team" of data and social scientists. This spring, it says its ads lowered Trump's approval rate by 3.6%.

The group's leader, James Barnes, helped pioneer some of its cutting-edge techniques in 2016 while working for the other side: he was the Facebook "embed" who taught the Trump campaign how to use Facebook and Instagram with tremendous success. His new effort—targeting low-information voters on all sides of the spectrum, as part of an aggressive $75 million campaign by a well-funded Democratic super PAC—isn't just an implicit attempt to make up for his work for Trump; it's a response to the mess his former has helped make, and an election marred by waves of misinformation. “One of the reasons that the work that we’re doing is so important, just reminding low-information voters—folks whom we have a lot of evidence that their opinions are easier to shift, and putting mainstream, fact-checked news in front of folks that help them understand what’s actually going on in the world—is because all of the decisions that Facebook has made, especially in the past few years."