New information from a British news outlet revealed that President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign team tried to keep millions of Black voters away from the polls.

British news outlet Channel 4 obtained a leaked database of voters that the Trump campaign used with 3.5 million names of Black people who were listed under the category of "Deterrence," meaning the goal was to discourage them from voting in the 2016 election.

The leak is a part of a larger trove of data taken from Cambridge Analytica, the shadowing digital company that helped the Trump campaign harness the massive database of Facebook users to pump up and depress certain groups of voters in 2016.

A number of racial groups were marked under "Deterrence" but Black people had the biggest proportion, particularly in states where Trump won with razor-thin margins.

The data from Channel 4 shows that Black people in Georgia accounted for 61% of the campaign’s "Deterrence" category despite making up only a third of the state's population.

The Brennan Center reported that Georgia officials managed to purge twice as many voters —1.5 million—between the 2012 and 2016 elections as it did between 2008 and 2012. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp also led the effort to invalidate the voter registrations for thousands of other people.

The number of Black people in the "Deterrence" section for states like North Carolina and Wisconsin were similarly high and resulted in corresponding drops in Black voter turnout.

According to Channel 4 News data, more than half of the "Deterrence" column was filled with Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans in addition to voters from other non-white groups.

The leak is part of the news outlet's larger investigation of the nefarious role Cambridge Analytica played in the 2016 election. The group helped the Trump campaign exploit Facebook and micro-target specific groups with advertisements.

Millions of Black people in 2016 who were on Facebook likely saw dozens of ads referencing then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's past "super predator" comment and other negative statements she has made in reference to Black people.

The ads, referred to by Cambridge Analytica employees as "dark ads" were pivotal in assisting Republican-led voter suppression efforts. More than 4 million people who voted for former President Barack Obama
stayed home in 2016, and more than a third of them were Black, according to The Washington Post.

Clinton apologized for the "super predator" remark but Channel 4 found evidence showing that Cambridge Analytica was privately admitting to using what they called "the predators video" to profusely target Black people.

The campaign spent $55,000 on the "super predator" ads on Facebook in Georgia.

The larger database contained information on 200 million American voters in 16 battleground states, many of which President Trump ended up winning closely.

According to Channel 4, Black people made up 46% of the "Deterrence" category in North Carolina, and 17% in Wisconsin.

Data has shown that the 2016 election was the first time in 20 years that Black voter turnout fell compared to the previous year.

With the help of a Facebook employee embedded in the campaign, Trump's officials proceeded to spend nearly $50 million on Facebook ads that were highly targeted toward ethnic groups.

Facebook said they have changed their platform so this cannot happen again. But the company has faced criticism from dozens of civil rights groups for not doing more to stop the spread of disinformation and falsehoods that proliferate widely on the platform.

“Since 2016, elections have changed and so has Facebook – what happened with Cambridge Analytica couldn’t happen today," the company said in a statement.

Following dozens of newspaper and government investigations, Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018. But two senior officials from the company are now working for Trump's 2020 campaign.

“I don’t believe Facebook has fully disclosed their role, and fully disclosed the types of ads that were run, who was involved and literally how they may have been embedded in, say, the Trump campaign to make this all come to life," Jamal Watkins, vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told Channel News 4 in a statement.

“Facebook is a very profitable platform. It reaches billions of folks every day. It doesn’t need this kind of money. If it were to monitor and check these suppressive ads and say this is not the platform for this type of misinformation disinformation suppression tactics, Mark Zuckerberg would still live well, and eat well,” he added.

Cambridge Analytica

Get relevant content delivered to you once a week