Two years ago, Facebook cited privacy concerns as it yanked a tool that had allowed President Barack Obama's reelection campaign to tap details about his supporters' friends and contacts.

But now Hillary Clinton's campaign has recreated it, allowing her volunteers to contact vast numbers of people they know on the social network — and giving her what her backers consider a key advantage over Donald Trump just weeks before the election.


Facebook had no comment on the Clinton campaign's tactic, which relies on specific features in how the company's iPhone apps interact with users' contact lists. The new tool, which Clinton's team debuted Thursday, is yet another example of the way political campaigns have sought to reach Americans who have all but given up on landlines but are constantly tied to their mobile phones.

In contrast, Trump’s campaign app offers only rudimentary tools for supporters to contact their friends, such as one-size-fits-all social media posts to “Join the Trump train.”

"We know voters are more likely to take an action if they've been compelled to do so by their friends,” says Teddy Goff, the lead digital strategist for the Clinton campaign, who played a similar role for Obama in 2012. “One of the key objectives of our organizing technology strategy is to provide our people ways to reach out to their friends in as targeted a way as possible."

For one brief window during Obama's reelection effort, Facebook was a solution to that problem, offering a feature that allowed the president's campaign to get access to supporters' friend lists, if they voluntarily shared them. The tool also suggested targeted messages that supporters could send their contacts on Facebook to encourage them to donate money, register to vote or share their enthusiasm for the candidate.

The Obama team saw it as an invaluable way to reach the more than half of the adult population of the United States who use the social network. But in the spring of 2014, the company slammed that window shut, saying users were wary of their Facebook friends sharing their details with third parties.

Now the Clinton campaign has restored some of that ability with a tweak of the Apple iOS version of its mobile app. The update lets the campaign, with the permission of Facebook users, tap into their friend lists that have been synced with their iPhone’s address book. Then the volunteers are walked through sending those friends text messages encouraging them to take specific actions on behalf of the Democratic candidate, from donating money to knocking on doors.

The Clinton campaign hopes the new capability will help rally its supporter base and advance its ground game through targeted micro-actions, thus boosting donations, volunteer hours and votes ahead of Nov. 8.

At the time of the 2012 campaign, users of the Obama for America app on Facebook could opt to open up their friend lists to the campaign, and the app would then prompt them to send messages on its behalf. Goff called the tool, dubbed Targeted Sharing, “the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for the campaign.”

But Facebook banned that ability in 2014, with a company product lead explaining, "People didn’t feel comfortable having their information shared.” (Some developers grumbled it was more that the company wanted to keep advertising dollars for itself.) So the Clinton operation set out over the last months to figure out another way to rebuild that pipeline.

“Mobile phones are the device everyone has with them all the time,” said Keegan Goudiss of the firm Revolution Messaging, which ran the Bernie Sanders campaign's digital operation. “And so it’s powerful to give supporters the ability to figure out from their phone, ‘OK, who’s the friend or family member or personal contact I should be reaching out to?’”

With its new updated app, the Clinton campaign is taking advantage of the close integration between the iPhone and Facebook that began back in 2013. If you install the Facebook app on your iPhone today, it’ll prod you to sync your social network friend list with your phone’s contact book. Give the Clinton campaign permission to access that list, and you’re pulling in not just every number you manually stored in your phone. It’s also the first and last names of your Facebook friends, along with their contact details pulled from Facebook.

When the friend list is loaded into Clinton’s app, the supporter swipes through Facebook headshots to get rid of those who’d never back Clinton. “That sort of Tinder-for-politics interface for identifying whether or not someone’s a supporter can be addictive," said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican digital strategist who served on the 2004 reelection bid of President George W. Bush.

From there, the friends that remain are sorted by area code into a map of the U.S., showing in an instant which contacts live in battleground states. Says Goff, ”If we need volunteers in Ohio and you've got a friend in Ohio, we're telling you to do that first.”

The Clinton app prompts users to pick a friend and ask them via scripted text message to give money, join the mailing list, or go knock on doors and ask for votes on Clinton’s behalf. Texting can be a potent delivery mechanism: Americans, say digital marketers, open nearly every text message that pops up on their phones.

The Clinton app has been downloaded more than 150,000 times, according to the campaign, and at last count, U.S. Facebook users had an average of about 340 friends. The campaign is betting that by combining the two, supporters can contribute to the friend-to-friend contacts possibly even in the millions in this election’s final days.

