The Trump Campaign Has Raised Millions Off Impeachment — And Facebook Is One of Its Most Powerful Tools

My 2019 cover story in TIME Magazine involved trawling through many thousands of ads that the Trump campaign purchased on Facebook in order to reverse-engineer the way they began fundraising off his first impeachment within minutes of when it was announced.

This is what I like to think of as Medium Data. The data available on political ad spending that Meta released were larger than one could gracefully manage with spreadsheets and pivot tables, but still small enough that I could go through the most interesting passages with a fine-toothed comb to check the conclusions of the code and look for anomalies that might be newsworthy. This is in contrast to Big Data, when megabytes become gigabytes or beyond and it becomes functionally impractical to check everything. (I still check as much as I can.)

I’ve often encouraged aspiring data journalists to “always meet your data,” inspecting it at its most granular level to understand how it is expressed in its rawest form. This is one of the best tools for avoiding error, because even modern AI models typically don’t pause to wonder if something smells fishy. This will continue to be true even when we finally get Artificial Noses.