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On Sunday, The Guardian reported on the supposedly nefarious workings of President Trump’s data-gathering team at Cambridge Analytica. The report suggested that Cambridge Analytica had essentially issued questionnaires through a third party; those questionnaires, which were personality quizzes, requested that you use your Facebook login. Cambridge Analytica then compiled data regarding those who completed the quiz and cross-referenced that data with political preferences in order to target potential voters.
This isn’t particularly shocking. In 2012, The Guardian reported that President Obama’s reelection team was “building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.”
What, exactly, would Obama be doing? According to The Guardian, Obama’s new database would be gathered by asking individual volunteers to log into Obama’s reelection site using their Facebook credentials. “Consciously or otherwise,” The Guardian states, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page — home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends — directly into the central Obama database.” Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. There’s a reason for that. The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She , “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
Not so with Trump. As soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm.
Again, this isn’t surprising. Since Trump’s election, Democrats — in search of a rationale for their favored candidate’s defeat — have blamed a bevy of social media outlets. Senate Democrats trotted out pathetic Russian-created memes on Facebook, viewed by a handful of human beings, as an excuse for Hillary’s loss; Democrats claimed — without evidence — that “fake news” had swamped Facebook and thus led to Trump’s victory. Democrats have also insisted that Facebook be regulated. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) raged, “You’ve created these platforms, and now they’re being misused, and you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will.” Facebook’s former privacy manager called for the government to step into an oversight role regarding Facebook.
In February, Wired magazine ran a cover story specifically dealing with Facebook’s role in the election of 2016, and their subsequent attempts to “fix” the problem. After the election, Mark Zuckerberg even met with Barack Obama, apparently in an attempt to convince Obama that he was serious about stopping the “misuse” of the platform. And in February, Zuckerberg said he wanted to re-jigger the algorithms on his platform to benefit content that Facebook deems “trustworthy, informative, and local.” Wired celebrated: “You can’t make the world more open and connected if you’re breaking it apart.”
The result of Facebook’s algorithmic changes: conservatives have been slammed. And that’s the point. A study from The Western Journal found that conservative sites have lost an average of 14 percent of their Facebook traffic; leftist sites saw a minor increase. Even major publications saw that effect: The New York Daily News saw a bump of 24.18 percent, while the New York Post dropped 11.44 percent.
And that’s the goal in covering Cambridge Analytica, and Russian interference on Twitter, and all the rest — even without any serious information suggesting that such interference shifted votes, the left can rest assured that its Silicon Valley allies will act to de-platform Republicans and conservatives. There’s a reason Twitter has suspended alt-right racists but continued to recommend that others follow Louis Farrakhan; there’s a reason YouTube is being sued by Prager University; there’s a reason Google used automatic fact-checking on right-wing sites but did no such thing for left-wing sites.
We’re in the midst of a radical reshifting in social media. Ironically, the people who have stumped against regulation — conservatives — are those being targeted by social media companies. If companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter don’t start acting like platforms again rather than like motivated left-wing outlets, Republicans likely won’t let principle outweigh practicality for long.
Hard to complain about something voluntary.
When I read this: (If companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter don’t start acting like platforms again rather than like motivated left-wing outlets, Republicans likely won’t let principle outweigh practicality for long.) I think you must not be paying attention. Facebook is where the right had really flourished. Online is where the alt-right stuff got going. Facebook always catered to the user, that was the issue. Thank God some steps are being taken against that. It has bred a good portion of the disinformation on both sides. Facebook Youtube, and Twitter are insane with the Trumpkins. You have them bringing drama to just about anything you can think of. I have literally said Trumpkin should replace buzzkill, because even on something like Ozzy's final tour, you got some Trump supporting blowhard, being a douche for absolutely no reason. Not a thing, and was ill placed, and made no sense. Still it's done all over the web. If people bring drama like that to everything it shows their disgusting mentality. It's rather insane.
Here's an approximation example of what I've seen. Message: Our new baby girl was blessed into this world today. Comment: Get that baby a MAGA onesie, and tell libtards to chew on this.
Trumpkins aren't regular Trump supporters. They are quite frankly a bunch of boorish nightmares unleashed.
Gotcha68 (03-20-2018)
Not the same thing. Obama did use facebook to contact people who he thought leaned his way.
Cambridge worked for Trump and they claimed they got him elected. They sent out questionnaires making people think they were polling. They stole data from 50 million people.They actually got info and zeroed in on those they felt they could move for Trump. They buried them in fake news stories . They sent nasty "crooked Hillary" emails. Cambridge was targeting these people relentlessly. This is not what Obama did.
Cambridge also says they used bribery and hookers.
Last edited by Nordberg; 03-20-2018 at 03:21 PM.
No they are not the same, Cambridge not only took information from those willing to take a survey, but from there took those accounts and mined into anyone those people had ever had contact with, results in over fifty million private accounts being hacked for personal information
Jade Dragon (03-20-2018), Sailor (03-20-2018)
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