The Harris County Elections Department is facing blowback for some of its social media ads relating to early voting. It appears they\u2019ve been targeting them specifically to non-white voters.<\/p>\n
This was first exposed by Parker Thayer with Capital Research, who took to X (formerly Twitter), saying: \u201cThe official Harris County, TX, Department of Elections bought $43,000 of early voting reminder ads on Facebook and Instagram, but many of the ads are using \u2018Detailed Targeting\u2019 filters clearly intended to discriminate on the basis of race.\u201d<\/p>\n
He spoke to KTRH about his findings, saying: \u201cThe county, apparently, selected filters for things like \u2018African American literature,\u2019 \u2018African culture,\u2019 \u2018Latin music,\u2019 and \u2018Spanish-speaking.\u2019\u201d He says he was able to determine this by viewing Meta\u2019s public ad tracker, which can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Thayer went on to say that he believes this could constitute both political and racial discrimination by the county. \u201cThe county went out of its way to apply race-minded filters to encourage the ads to be shown to demographics that historically vote Democrat,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n Thayer added that this type of political and racial discrimination has no place in politics.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve reached out to the county Elections Department via email about all of this, but as of publication, they had not responded to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Harris County Elections Department is facing blowback for some of its social media ads relating to early…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57,66,223,27],"class_list":["post-480262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-local","tag-news","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}