Trump campaign’s embrace of Facebook shows company’s growing reach in elections

The Washington Post reports:

At the final debate of last year’s presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton ridiculed Donald Trump as a “puppet” of the Russians and denounced his treatment of women. She was widely seen as the winner that night in Las Vegas and the favorite to win the presidency weeks later.

On Facebook, however, a different story was unfolding for millions of Americans, whose feeds were being saturated with eye-catching ads bolstering Trump.

Out of view of the broader public, the site was serving as a platform for an intense barrage of advertisements tailored to reach Trump’s supporters with maximum impact throughout the debate day and night. By the end of the day, the Trump campaign had run 175,000 variations of ads on Facebook, pushing distinct versions to different users to test which ones worked best. The high-velocity churn drew $9 million in donations, the campaign’s biggest single-day money haul of the year.

The decline of TV ads and the rise of Facebook.