Facebook placed its users into 14 different “segments” based on their different political ideologies so they could be more effectively targeted by advertisers during the 2016 election, according to a sales pitch obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Facebook’s snapshot of our fractured republic
(via @BuzzFeedNews) pic.twitter.com/Y1ntYmryHW— Michael Hendrix (@michael_hendrix) October 30, 2017
“We typically help marketers across all verticals understand audiences this way, and we briefly used this framework to help inform how a small number of marketers built their campaigns,” a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. The spokesperson said these verticals have since been removed as part of a ”regular refresh” and aren’t available anymore.
But BuzzFeed News points out that these segments could’ve served as a “blueprint” for anyone looking to sow further divides in the country; this report comes after Facebook is slated to admit to Congress that more than half of its American users may have seen content from accounts linked to Russian pages.
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