Left to right: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Vice President Mike Pence listen as President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting of technology executives at Trump Tower in New York City on December 14, 2016. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Facebook is making millions off of impeachment ads from Trump, his allies, and his adversaries.

Donald Trump is angry about impeachment and he wants his supporters to be, too — and he’s spending millions of dollars to make that happen.

Trump’s campaign is leaning heavily into Facebook advertising in his reelection bid, including when it comes to defending him against House Democrats’ ongoing impeachment inquiry. Since his first Facebook ad on the subject in September, Trump has spent about $1.6 million on Facebook posts addressing impeachment — his most expensive topic besides himself.

And instead of trying to persuade voters who live in the states that will decide 2020, he appears to instead be trying to rile up his base (and get their information if he doesn’t already have it). His campaign is using Facebook ads as a way to reinforce the narrative cycle from the White House, Republican lawmakers, and conservative media that impeachment is a political plot against the president by Democrats. His ads, by and large, don’t deal with the substance of the allegations — that he and his administration tried to leverage US foreign policy to convince Ukraine to investigate a personal political rival — and instead push conspiracies. They are a way for the president’s reelection campaign to build voter lists, streamline in potential volunteers and donors, and keep public opinion from swinging too far out of Trump’s favor.

More broadly, Trump’s impeachment strategy on Facebook highlights the enormous amount of resources he has not only to fight back against Democrats in Congress but also his eventual 2020 Democratic presidential opponent.

“This is a battle over public opinion,” said David Gergen, an adviser to four presidents, including the two who most recently faced impeachment, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

Facebook itself has grown into a formidable political platform in recent years, with campaigns and outside groups spending $284 million on the platform during the midterm elections, according to a report by Tech for Campaigns, a nonprofit that helps political campaigns with digital tools. While that’s just a small share of Facebook’s overall ad revenue, it’s a growing chunk of what campaigns are spending to reach constituents.

The site itself is a place of rampant political disinformation, providing a platform for fake news to flourish and even for foreign actors to actively try to impact a US election. More recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has doubled down on allowing politicians to circulate political ads with lies, with predictably disastrous results. In October, Facebook was criticized for refusing to take down a Trump ad that falsely accused former vice president Joe Biden of promising Ukraine money for firing a prosecutor investigating a company with ties to Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

Recode used Facebook ad data collected by Democratic consultancy Bully Pulpit Interactive to decipher how much Trump is spending, who he’s talking to, and what kind of messaging he’s using when it comes to impeachment. We also looked at what some of the other big spenders on impeachment advertising are saying. On an already divisive issue, it seems Facebook users are seeing ads designed to divide them even more. This is how Facebook has always functioned, despite promises to improve, including after the 2016 election.

“The battle lines are pretty drawn here between Republicans and Democrats, particularly around impeachment,” said Daniel Kreiss, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism.

Trump is talking about impeachment to older voters in big states

Trump ran his first impeachment ad on Facebook on September 24, the day House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced a formal impeachment inquiry into the president, calling the proceedings a “WITCH HUNT.”

The next day, Trump spent the most on a single impeachment-related Facebook ad buy, $335,430. The ad posed the impeachment as an effort to “take YOUR VOTE away.”

Since running that first ad, Trump has spent a small fortune on impeachment ads — nearly 30 percent of his total Facebook ad spend in that time. He’s geared that spending toward the most populous — though not likely to flip — states: Texas, California, Florida, and New York.

The vast majority of that ad spending — 90 percent — was aimed at people over the age of 35, with nearly 30 percent of that spending geared toward people 65 and over. That’s even older than the demographic for Trump’s typical Facebook ads. Fifty-five percent of his impeachment ad spending was aimed at men, 45 percent women — more skewed toward men than the rest of Trump’s Facebook advertising.

When people click through on the ad, most of the time they’re asked to input their name, zip code, email address, and phone number — information that will get them into the Trump campaign’s database. It’s part of the Trump campaign’s “engagement ladder,” said Rory McShane, a Republican political consultant, for later sending emails asking for donations and potentially getting backers to volunteer for the campaign, knocking on doors or making phone calls, and later to ultimately vote.

“He views the impeachment messaging as a way to fire up his supporters and mobilize his base,” Kreiss said. “Digital ads are huge mobilization and organizational tools, particularly at this stage in the race.”

What Trump is not doing is focusing impeachment ads — or Facebook ads in general — at the voters in the states that helped him win the electoral college in 2016 and will probably matter again in 2020, such as Wisconsin and Michigan. Part of the explanation is that it’s really early to be spending money on persuasion ads. But Trump is also testing out messaging that he might eventually use to target people in those states to see what resonates most with different demographics. Given how polarized an era we live in, campaigns such as Trump’s lean heavily into trying to get people who already like him engaged and out to vote, and getting them riled up helps that. And that’s what Facebook’s algorithm is built to do: keep people engaged, often with content that reinforces their views or prompts a strong reaction.

“This goes to the changing American electoral strategy” of motivating the base rather than targeting people who might be persuaded, McShane said. “The swing voter is dead.”

“It’s easier to rile up the bases than it used to be,” said Matt Grossmann, a political science professor at Michigan State University.

Trump wants to reinforce his narrative on impeachment — and keep the polls and Republican lawmakers in check

Trump has basically one strategy for his presidency: fight back all the time and cede no ground to his critics. On impeachment, it’s no different. His message has been that this is a political ploy by Democrats to undermine him and that he’s done nothing wrong, despite evidence, including witness testimony and a transcript released by the White House itself, that Trump withheld US military aid to Ukraine in an effort to pressure Ukrainian President Zelensky to open investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

According to a FiveThirtyEight average of impeachment polling, 48 percent of Americans support impeaching Trump and 44 percent oppose. When you break that down by party, 83 percent of Democrats, 44 percent of independents, and 10 percent of Republicans support impeachment. That support has grown in the almost two months since Pelosi announced the inquiry, and if public opinion swings more in favor of impeachment than it is currently, that could make it easier for Republicans to vote against the president and alleviate some of the pressure on moderate Democrats from their constituents.

But Trump has an elaborate apparatus in the Republican Party and outlets such as Fox News to back him up. Facebook is just one more bulwark.

Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said that Trump’s strategy on impeachment puts pressure on Republicans to hold the line. The House, in which Democrats have a majority, ultimately decides whether to impeach Trump, and a two-thirds vote in the Senate, which Republicans control, would be required to convict him and remove him from office.

Politico reported in October that Trump is using the promise of fundraising help for Republican senators in the hope of keeping them in line.

Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster and columnist, pointed out that the states Trump is targeting are home to multiple congressional races that Cook Political Report currently rates as leans or toss-ups for 2020. And right now, there are basically just three Senate Republicans who aren’t wholeheartedly defending President Trump on impeachment: Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Mitt Romney (R-UT).

“It’s not only about making sure that Republican base voters are motivated to vote in the general election but also to make sure that those voters will side with Trump over any dissident House or Senate Republicans who might cross the president,” Kondik said.

Trump has a lot of money to spend on impeachment and to get himself reelected

Incumbent presidents always have an advantage over their opponents. Barack Obama did in 2012 and Trump does now. And he is taking advantage of it.

Trump filed for reelection on the day of his inauguration in 2017 and has never really stopped running for president. He also has a vast campaign infrastructure and millions upon millions of dollars behind him. At the end of the third quarter of this year, his campaign had $83 million in cash on hand. The best-funded Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, has $33 million.

By the time there is an actual Democratic nominee next summer, Trump will have been running for reelection for three-and-a-half years. With Facebook ads, his campaign is figuring out what does and doesn’t work with voters and supporters, including on impeachment.

Trump is also facing a different scenario from Nixon and Clinton. Neither was running for reelection during impeachment processes against them — and neither had so much cash with which to push back. “He’s had much more of a big-money, big-advertising campaign than we saw with either Nixon or Clinton,” Gergen said.

Lots of people are running Facebook ads on impeachment

Trump is hardly the only figure running impeachment-related ads on Facebook — multiple candidates, political groups, and even a spice store are doing the same. According to data from Bully Pulpit, the top 15 Facebook advertisers on impeachment have spent $6 million since Bully Pulpit began collecting this data in late March, with the top seven spenders beyond Trump being pro-impeachment group Need to Impeach, its billionaire founder and now 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer, spice company Penzeys, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and progressive strategy group Acronym.

And much like Trump, each group’s messaging and targeting around impeachment reveals information about their broader strategies.

Need to Impeach is the biggest spender on Facebook impeachment ads at $1.8 million since March, (though its spending has slowed down since Steyer entered the presidential race and started directing his resources elsewhere). More than half of its ad spend is targeted at people under the age of 35.

Steyer himself has spent almost $700,000 on impeachment ads, starting soon after he announced he would run in July. Three of the four states he’s spending the most in are early primary states in the 2020 presidential race — South Carolina, Iowa, and Nevada — an indicator he’s trying to persuade Democratic voters there and remind them he’s been on the impeachment train for a long time. Warren, who called for Trump’s impeachment after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report this spring, is dedicating most of her Facebook impeachment spend to states with a lot of people. She’s list-building. And while her original messaging was around the Mueller report, she is now also running ads on the current impeachment inquiry in Congress.

Acronym, which is planning on a $75 million digital ad campaign to counter Trump this election cycle, is targeting the states Democrats most need to win if they want to defeat him next year: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. They’re trying to head off some of Trump’s incumbent advantage while the 2020 candidates duke it out in the primary. “We can’t afford not to do this work right now,” Acronym CEO Tara McGowan recently told the New York Times. Their ads are largely advancing Democratic arguments on impeachment — that Trump asked the Ukrainian president to interfere in US elections and there is support for an inquiry.

On the Republican end of things, America First Policies has been running Facebook ads aimed at many Democratic members of Congress whose seats Republicans are trying to flip in 2020. It has also run ads telling people in Florida, which Trump won in 2016, to “help stop the impeachment plot” and register to vote. McConnell, like Warren and Trump, seems to be more list-building and base-riling than he is voter-persuading — he’s spending the most on ads in Texas, Florida, California, New York, and Ohio (his home state of Kentucky, where he’s up for reelection in 2020, is his ninth-biggest spend), and his ads are attacking House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and hyping up the importance of keeping the Republican majority in the Senate to stop Democrats.

And then there’s Penzeys, the Wisconsin-based spice company that has raised eyebrows with its heavy spending on Facebook ads on impeachment. The ads are a mix of product offerings, email list sign-ups, and swipes at Trump. And owner Bill Penzey says the messages are playing with customers. “The reason we spent so much is that this ad has worked better than any ad we’ve ever placed,” he told Fox Business in October.

It appears Facebook impeachment ads are a winning game for a lot of people — or at least they’re hoping so.

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Instagram is a beauty pageant. TikTok is where kids are free to be mediocre.

There’s a TikTok that’s just a boy saying, “I may be ugly, but at least I’m also … dumb and annoying.” Then he dances while Ariana Grande’s “Successful” plays. It’s extremely funny, and a little bit sad, and I think about it every day.

Kids on TikTok call themselves ugly all the time, most of the time as a joke, but not always, and I’m never sure how I’m supposed to feel about it. “Why do I look like this? What’s the reason?” asked the popular TikToker @emmwee in her car without makeup. “Me being shocked at how ugly I look,” wrote Brittany Tomlinson, better known as the kombucha girl, at one moment in an unrelated video. “I like a boy but I’m ugly, what do I do with that?” sings 18-year-old high school senior David Postlewate, in one TikTok about a highly familiar experience.

David isn’t ugly by any means — none of these kids are — but the internet has created a never-ending conveyor belt of people so bafflingly good-looking that everyone else is immediately rendered ugly by comparison. “I know that I’m not going to look like Benji Krol,” says David, referring to the TikToker with a nest of raven hair and 5.6 million followers. “But I’m my own person, and that’s what makes you beautiful,” he says, not consciously referring to the One Direction song.

The thing about TikTok is that as much as it is a place for teenagers to goof off in their bedrooms, it is also the world’s largest beauty pageant. After all, part of the fun about making TikToks is getting to stare at your face for as long as you want, and if you happen to be very, very beautiful, then other people will enjoy staring at your face, too. A stunningly massive portion of the app is devoted to genetically blessed users, e-boys like Benji Krol and human Barbies like Loren Gray. A scroll through the TikTok’s home For You feed will reveal plenty of content where, despite whatever action is going on in the video, the real takeaway is “I’m hot.”

It is against this backdrop that its inverse, “I’m ugly” culture, has proliferated. Rather than trying to compete for views and likes with the genetically gifted, kids are pivoting to self-deprecation in a way that’s less depressing than it might seem to concerned parents: it’s a reclamation of mediocrity in an online space where everyone else is an overachiever.

17-year-old Annie Pham was satirizing TikTok’s culture of hot people and glow-ups when she made her viral video in late August. Using a popular meme where people would show their “before” selves and their “after” selves on the beat drop, Annie’s instead showed her “before” self trying and failing to transform. “Why isn’t it working?” she complains to the camera. “After like, a week, I was reading the comments, and it was really cool to see how much people relate to it,” she says.

Relatable videos are why people like TikTok in the first place, and feeling unattractive on TikTok is one of the most relatable experiences of all. David, of the “I like a boy but I’m ugly” video, for instance, has a TikTok bio that reads “ugly is my only personality trait.”

David only made the video because that’s what was happening in his life: He liked a boy who he thought was out of his league. (“He’s really cute, he goes to my school. We’re both in theater,” he says.) He describes himself as a “really confident person,” by the way. He just doesn’t take himself all that seriously.

Normal kids have created an entire genre of internet comedy devoted to how constantly seeing exceptional talent and beauty go viral makes the rest of us feel like ugly losers. On my feed I see videos of kids turning the shitty aspects of their lives into funny content: their most embarrassing sports mistakes, hideous childhood photos, dilapidated apartments, unfortunate haircuts, leg nipples, imprisoned parents, disproportionately long thumbs, sexual ineptitude, mental illness. And of course, their minor physical insecurities: girls who feel like they’re asymmetrical, girls who hate their smiles, girls who have a cute, pretty face but a body that “looks like a fucking potato.”

The layers of irony on any social media app that young people are using can be difficult for adults to parse, but when it relates to topics like body image and self-esteem, psychologists take it seriously. “I kind of celebrate what they’re doing — they’re trying to push back on the idea that we all look perfect on social media,” says Sara Frischer, a psychiatric nurse practitioner at Union Square Practice in New York City. “But I think it’s just a little misguided in how they’re doing it. It’s deflection, and it’s self-protective to then make a joke about it. It protects people from feeling vulnerable.” She gives the example of being a bad speller. If you say to yourself that you’re the worst speller in the world, that’s protecting yourself from someone else pointing it out.

But what if you’re just objectively a bad speller? What would true acceptance of that fact even look like? “That’s where self-compassion comes in,” she says. “Saying, ‘This is something I really struggle with, and I just happen to not be such a great speller.’ Having compassion for yourself, talking about how hard it is to struggle with this, and all the emotions involved. It’s adding self-compassion instead of self-deprecation. That’s the missing element.”

“I’m ugly” culture has spread so far on TikTok that now even TikTok’s “pretty people” are co-opting sounds and memes meant for those self-described uglies. That’s given way to a wider culture of policing, wherein those users’ comments sections are flooded with fishing rods to signify that they’re fishing for compliments.

In July, Ryan Sterling, a 23-year-old in the Chicago suburbs who has had alopecia since he was in middle school, uploaded a video that begins with a picture of Britney Spears with a shaved head followed by a picture of Mr. Clean, and then himself: “It all started when my mom met my dad, then they fell in love, and they had me. Hi, I’m Ryan,” he says. “And my life? It’s kinda crazy.”

Within a few weeks, the “Hi, I’m Ryan” video had spawned a massive viral meme, even ending up on a segment of Ellen. But whereas Ryan’s original video made fun of the way he looked, iterations that came after — often where a person would show their two very attractive parents and the punchline was their even more attractive self — were little more than excuses to brag. In September, Ryan posted another TikTok directed at them: “Get off my sound, it’s for ugly people!” he says. “All you pretty-ass people with your pretty parents and your perfect genes, get out of here! We uglies and the balds and the grosses and the ickies, we need to fight back!”

Olivia Chesney, a 19-year-old at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, was in the middle of homework when she went into the bathroom to make a random video. She’s standing in front of the mirror and asking, “Why do I be looking so good from the front?” Then she turns to the side and bursts out laughing. The joke is that she looks bigger that way, and the video now has more than 2.5 million views.

That video isn’t the only TikTok she’s made about her body, and not all of them are self-deprecating. There’s one where she shows cute photos her friends have taken of her, and another lip synching to the 1958 swing song “The Bigger the Figure.”

Olivia, like all of us, lives in a world where even if you aren’t born skinny, or distractingly gorgeous, or whatever, you’re still supposed to do everything you possibly can to become those things; to starve your body down and add on some lip fillers until you’re deemed presentable. Americans continue to spend more money on plastic surgery and weight loss plans every year, and one study of UK youth showed that Instagram had the worst effect on body image among any social media site. There are an ever-growing number of billion-dollar industries built upon the profits that come from making people feel awful about themselves, even if those products are shrouded in the aesthetics of positivity and empowerment.

Calling yourself ugly on TikTok, then, is a form of freedom from the expectation of hotness. It’s a self-deprecating in-joke that only excludes the extraordinarily beautiful, who could maybe stand to be excluded from something for once.

“I’m ugly” culture on TikTok also obfuscates its happier subtext: That yeah, it’s okay to be ugly, because now you can focus on more important things. Olivia explains this feeling while talking about a video where she calls herself fat: “People who are ugly, people who are fat, it’s just like, why are we trying to hide it anymore? We can still live our lives and be that way.”

It’s not like “ugly” people don’t happy lives or fall in love or get rich or go viral on TikTok. The boy that David sang about? The one he liked? It’s possible that they’re maybe, sort of in the process of getting together.

“If I’m going to be completely honest, and I don’t know yet because things haven’t really been official,” he tells me, “but I think that stuff is starting to happen with him.” It’s all extremely beautiful.

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