If you haven’t heard the name Robert Mercer before, it’s about time you don your learning cap.
By now everyone knows that Facebook is a cesspool of misinformation and fear-mongering, and once Facebook pawned off millions of users’ data the big spenders could really make their money count.
Robert Mercer happens to be a billionaire, and during the lead up to the 2016 American elections he spent big spreading these ads below across Facebook.
Before we watch the propaganda, let’s crunch some numbers via Quartz:
Mercer [below], a former backer of Breitbart News, gave $2 million to little-known organization [sic] Secure America Now (SAN), which produced the videos, in 2016, according to tax documents obtained in the investigation. Ronald Lauder, heir to Estée Lauder, gave $1.1 million to SAN.
Mercer also poured funds into Cambridge Analytica, the research company that gathered the data of 50 million Facebook users without their permission and used it to target potential Trump voters.
The Mercer family has donated $36,6m to Republican candidates since 2010, including close to $27 million on Trump’s campaign alone.
I suppose you could call these ads polished, but what’s laughable is that this is the kind of rhetoric that actually resonated with so many voters who eventually chose Trump.
First up, France:
Then Germany:
And lastly, good ‘ol USA:
The mind boggles.
And you wonder why Trump retweets far-right anti-Islam videos to his followers.
That country really has lost the plot.
[source:quartz]
