Leftist academics have a long and tiring history of draft papers short on content (see Feminist Professors to College Students: Stop Citing White Males Because Racism and Fresno State Professor Wants to “Save America” by Hanging Trump). Now, one paper seeks to "expose" how Facebook, YouTube, Google, and other social media helped Trump win. Single-handedly. Yes, those same social media outlets owned lock, stock, and barrel-bellied by leftists.

The peer-reviewed paper, based on more than a dozen interviews with both tech company staffers who worked inside several 2016 presidential campaigns and campaign officials, sheds new light on Silicon Valley's assistance to Trump before his surprise win last November.

While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad pushes around upcoming speeches.

Yes. That's the job of an advertising consultant: to find the right audience, target them with appropriate ads. It's called "strategy." A complicated entity foreign to the microscopic minds of the left. And because the consultants dared to actually work on behalf of their clients, this "peer reviewed" paper is throwing a hissy fit.

Such support was critical for the Trump campaign, which didn’t invest heavily in its own digital operations during the primary season and made extensive use of Facebook, Twitter and Google "embeds" for the general election, says the study, conducted by communications professors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Utah.

The companies offered such services, without charge, to all the 2016 candidates, according to the study, which details extensive tech company involvement at every stage of the race. But Hillary Clinton’s campaign declined to embed the companies' employees in her operations, instead opting to develop its own digital apparatus and call in the tech firms to help execute elements of its strategy.

“Facebook, Twitter, and Google [went] beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys," the paper concludes, adding that their efforts extended to "actively shaping campaign communications through their close collaboration with political staffers."

Let's recap. Social media outlets supposedly offered free advertising advice to the presidential campaigns. Clinton's campaign declined because in their pompous heads they were totes sure they would win. Trump's campaign maximized their capital and implemented the advertising services.

...the problem is?

This paper and Politico want to go even further in saying these media entities are overly conservative, and they single-handedly won the election for Trump. Not so. It seems leftist snot blobs are just trying to get social media to censor conservative voices even more than they already are (see CAUGHT: Project Veritas Exposes How YouTube Manipulates ‘Trending News’…). Especially because Zuckerberg is more sensitive than a 12-year-old girl going through puberty. He bends like a garden hose.

Just like Vox and other news entities, Politico is encouraging media giants like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to actively censor conservative voices. By claiming a bias which just isn't there.

It's frightening.

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