By Deepa Seetharaman
After the 2016 presidential election, Republican Party officials
credited Facebook Inc. with helping Donald Trump win the White
House. One senior official singled out a then-28-year-old Facebook
employee embedded with the Trump campaign, calling him an
"MVP."
Now that key player is working for the other side -- as national
debate intensifies over Facebook's role in politics.
James Barnes left Facebook this spring, and said he is now
dedicated to using the digital-ad strategies he employed on behalf
of the Trump campaign to get President Trump out of office in 2020.
Mr. Barnes, who had been a lifelong Republican, has registered as a
Democrat and recently started working with a progressive nonprofit
called Acronym, where former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe
is on the board.
In a series of interviews over the past three weeks, Mr. Barnes
discussed how he helped the Trump campaign leverage some of
Facebook's powerful tools and products to extend its reach. He
talked about the pressure he felt behind the scenes, both from the
Trump campaign and some colleagues at Facebook. His account sheds
new light on Facebook's role in the Trump campaign and what
Democrats are trying to learn from it going into the next
presidential election.
Mr. Barnes said he remains supportive of Facebook's mission but
is uneasy about the company's influence on political discourse. One
question that has nagged him over the past three years about his
time at Facebook: "Did I actually do the right thing?"
Social-media platforms are sure to be a critical battlefield in
2020, with political spending on digital advertising expected to
hit $2.9 billion, up from $1.4 billion in 2016, according to
consulting firm Borrell Associates Inc. The Trump re-election
campaign is already pouring money into Facebook ads, and Democratic
candidates are ramping up.
Facebook has openly grappled with its approach to political
advertising in the wake of revelations that Russian entities
purchased digital ads designed to influence the results of the 2016
presidential election. It has also faced criticism for giving
political campaigns access to sophisticated targeting tools, which
in some cases allowed political actors to single out groups of
users for misleading ads. In response, Facebook has made changes to
slow the spread of misinformation and eliminated commissions for
employees who sell political ads. The company is also considering
ways to make it harder to target political ads to very small groups
of people.
Another big change that came out of this reckoning: Last year,
Facebook said it would no longer embed its employees with political
campaigns, as Mr. Barnes had done.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has discussed his own
soul-searching around whether Facebook should accept political ads
at all, eventually deciding that it should and that it wouldn't
fact-check those messages as it does other content.
Facebook has played an increasingly large role in each of the
last three U.S. presidential elections. In 2008, Barack Obama's
campaign was lauded for using Facebook to help reach young voters.
In 2012, President Obama's re-election campaign created an app that
plugged into the Facebook developer platform and allowed users to
prod friends in swing states to vote.
The company's political ad strategy was initially modeled on its
playbook for top corporate clients: Facebook employees offered
on-site support to the U.S. presidential candidates who were
considered the presumptive nominees for their parties.
Mr. Barnes joined Facebook's political ad sales team in June
2013 in Washington, following a stint at a digital consulting firm
that worked for John McCain's two presidential campaigns.
Like other tech companies, Facebook divvies up its political ad
sales team by party. Republican employees usually work with
Republican clients; Democrats work with Democrats. Mr. Barnes was
part of the team that exclusively dealt with Republicans.
In many ways, Mr. Barnes is the archetype of a Silicon Valley
tech worker. He's analytical and measured. He's earnest and
idealistic, describing on multiple occasions his desire to do good
in the world. He fasts intermittently, sometimes going 72 hours
between meals.
In other ways, he cuts against type. He grew up in
Hendersonville, Tenn., in an evangelical family that attended
church on Wednesday nights. His mother, Tami West, says he was an
Alex P. Keaton type: independent and staunchly Republican.
By the time the 2016 campaign was heating up, the developer
platform used by the Obama campaign was mostly closed off, as part
of a shift in Facebook's strategy, but Facebook's ad-targeting
tools had grown more sophisticated.
Mr. Barnes became the Trump campaign's go-to resource for
figuring out how to maximize those tools. In April 2016, after a
weekend at the Coachella music festival in California, he and his
manager flew to San Antonio to meet with Brad Parscale, who became
the digital director of the Trump campaign. In Mr. Parscale's
office, and later at Bohanan's, a local steak house, they discussed
how Facebook could help the campaign.
One of the first things Mr. Barnes and his team advised campaign
officials to do was to start running fundraising ads targeting
Facebook users who liked or commented on Mr. Trump's posts over the
past month using a product now called " engagement custom
audiences."
The product, which Mr. Barnes hand-coded, was available to a
small group, including Republican and Democratic political clients.
(The ad tool was rolled out widely around Election Day.) Within the
first few days, every dollar that the Trump campaign spent on these
ads yielded $2 to $3 in fundraising dollars, said Mr. Barnes, who
added that the campaign raised millions of dollars in those first
few days.
Mr. Barnes frequently flew to Texas, sometimes staying for four
days at a time and logging 12-hour days. By July, he says, he was
solely focused on the Trump campaign. When on-site in the building
that served as the Trump campaign's digital headquarters in San
Antonio, he sometimes sat a few feet from Mr. Parscale.
The intense pace reflected Trump officials' full-throated
embrace of Facebook's platform, in the absence of a more
traditional campaign structure including donor files and massive
email databases.
The Trump campaign would give Mr. Barnes certain videos or
images, such as a video of Donald Trump Jr. urging voters to build
the border wall. Mr. Barnes would experiment with different ways to
display the ad. One ad might say "donate" while another would say
"give." Some videos would be vertical; others were square. Buttons
could be highlighted in red or green.
Each variation of the ad would be targeted to certain
demographics. It could be as specific as 18-to-24 year old men who
visited the Trump campaign donation page and made it to the third
step but never finished, according to Mr. Barnes. They tested all
the variations and doubled down on those that raised the most
money.
Trump campaign officials have said that some days the campaign
churned out 100,000 separate versions of Facebook ads. Mr. Parscale
is overseeing the Trump re-election campaign this year.
One official from the 2016 Trump campaign said it primarily
relied on Mr. Barnes for troubleshooting and complained to Facebook
about periodic technical issues that the campaign argued hurt the
campaign's performance. The official, who is also working on Mr.
Trump's re-election campaign, declined to comment further.
Mr. Barnes's Democratic counterparts at Facebook weren't getting
the same reception. Tatenda Musapatike, a former Facebook employee
who worked with Democratic PACs and other independent expenditure
groups in 2016, said she felt many Democrats held Facebook at arm's
length.
"For James, he'd suggest something and they'd say, 'Sure, let's
try it,' " said Ms. Musapatike. "It was a battle for us to get
anything accepted at a much smaller scale."
Hillary Clinton's campaign didn't have Facebook employees
stationed on site, according to people familiar with the campaign.
One former Clinton campaign official said the campaign didn't want
to give Facebook staffers a "24/7 opportunity" to sell more ads by
embedding with the staff. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton didn't
respond to a request for comment.
Facebook referred to its prior comments on the embed program.
Last year, Facebook told lawmakers that it didn't assign anybody
"full-time" to either campaign and that it offered "identical
support" to both sides.
Mr. Barnes said the experience was exhilarating but isolating.
He was thrilled that the tools he helped build were working. But
while he had a good relationship with Mr. Parscale and the
campaign's digital advertising director, Gary Coby, at times Mr.
Barnes had reservations about Mr. Trump's tone and rhetoric.
Still, Mr. Barnes said he felt he had a responsibility to help
Facebook follow through on its commitment to help candidates
regardless of their politics.
"I used to describe my job as defending Trump to Facebook and
defending Facebook to Trump," he said.
Internally, Facebook staffers questioned the company's role in
politics. Sometimes they would ask why Facebook was offering
assistance to the Trump campaign in the first place, according to
Mr. Barnes and other former Facebook employees.
The critiques wore on Mr. Barnes. "It felt really isolating and
lonely that I was at the nexus of all of this stuff," he said.
During the campaign, Trump campaign officials frequently
threatened to go to the press if Mr. Barnes and other Facebook
employees failed to address problems to their satisfaction, he
said.
For example, the Trump campaign needed a large credit line from
Facebook, according to Mr. Barnes and others familiar with the
situation. This issue posed unique challenges. Facebook sometimes
extends credit to a select group of digital agencies, but Mr.
Parscale's outfit didn't qualify for a large line because it didn't
have a track record with Facebook, according to people familiar
with the matter. The Trump team also wanted to pay for ads with a
credit card, but Facebook's payments system wasn't set up to handle
payments of as much as $300,000 to $400,000 a day on a credit card,
according to Mr. Barnes and others familiar with the matter.
As employees looked for ways to mend the problem, Mr. Parscale
texted Mr. Barnes to say Mr. Trump would go on TV and "say Facebook
was being unfair to him" if the issue wasn't resolved quickly, Mr.
Barnes said. Eventually, Facebook came up with a fix.
Mr. Barnes said he felt responsible for protecting Facebook from
these potential attacks.
Mr. Barnes said he ultimately voted for Mrs. Clinton. Ms.
Musapatike said Mr. Barnes was in a funk after the election. "He
had a difficult time reckoning with the impact of the election and
his work," she said.
A few days after the election, Mr. Coby directly praised Mr.
Barnes on Twitter. In a now-deleted tweet, he said "@jameslbarnes
of FB was a MVP."
Being called out by name at a time when Trump supporters were
being targeted by threats online was "terrifying," Mr. Barnes said.
Facebook's security team called him with instructions on how he
could protect himself and his privacy online.
Months later Mr. Barnes moved to San Francisco, joining a team
that helped retailers like Macy's use Facebook's products. He tried
to forget politics.
In December 2017, Mr. Barnes said, he was interviewed for nine
hours by investigators for special counsel Robert Mueller. At one
point they asked him if he noticed any Russians hanging around the
campaign, he said. "You wanna make a joke in that scenario," he
said, but "it's not the opportunity to make a joke." He told them
he didn't see Russians.
Mr. Barnes said he also spoke to the Securities and Exchange
Commission about the company's connection to Cambridge Analytica,
which purchased data of about 87 million users of Facebook from a
researcher without the consent of Facebook or the users.
Mr. Barnes doesn't think Cambridge Analytica uploaded any
illicitly gained Facebook user data to target ads, but that it
wasn't the norm for Facebook employees to ask for such details.
Former Cambridge Analytica officials have denied using the data for
the 2016 election. The SEC declined to comment.
At one point, in mid-2018, Mr. Barnes helped design Facebook's
much-touted war room for managing election integrity in the U.S.
and abroad. Shortly before a press junket to showcase the effort,
he said, two Facebook public-relations officials advised him to
stay away from the event in case journalists raised questions about
his role helping the Trump campaign.
That week, as he sat at his desk surrounded by empty seats, his
frustration reached a breaking point. "[I'm thinking], when am I
going to stop paying the price for this?"
In early 2019, Mr. Barnes took advantage of a Facebook perk
called "recharge" which gives employees 30 days off after they have
been at Facebook for five years.
He considered going back to Facebook, but opted to take an
active role opposing Mr. Trump's re-election. In a private Facebook
post on Aug. 5, he wrote that Mr. Trump's slogan, Make America
Great Again, was about "activating the deepest, darkest, soul of
white nationalism."
One of his calls was to former colleague Ms. Musapatike, who
left in March to join Acronym as its senior director of campaigns
overseeing the group's online voter registration and mobilization
programs. Chris Cox, Facebook's former chief product officer, is
now an informal adviser to Acronym and, people familiar with the
matter say, one of its donors.
Ms. Musapatike warned Mr. Barnes that he might be viewed with
suspicion at Acronym because of his work for Mr. Trump. She vouched
for Mr. Barnes with Tara McGowan, the founder and chief executive
of Acronym.
Mr. Barnes decided he liked Acronym's goal to beat Mr. Trump at
his own game, online and on Facebook. This month, Acronym and its
affiliated PAC announced plans to spend $75 million on digital ads.
Mr. Barnes oversees Acronym's analytics, helping Acronym understand
if its ads work.
Mr. Plouffe believes the former Facebook employee gives
Democrats a secret weapon as part of a revamped effort to meet Mr.
Trump on the social-media battlefield.
"He understands the most dominant platform in politics
exceedingly well, " Mr. Plouffe said of Mr. Barnes. "He thinks
differently from someone who grew up in politics a decade or more
ago."
--Jim Oberman and Emily Glazer contributed to this article.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 23, 2019 10:23 ET (15:23 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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