trump campaign firm: illegally harvested Facebook info for trump campaign

I hear what you're suggesting, @Commodore , sincerely. The media did largely fall in love with Obama in 2008.

However, is there any shred of evidence that his campaign: benefitted from a foreign power's troll farm attacking his opponents; or did business with an analytics firm that illicitly harvested tens of millions of user profiles from Facebook?

But he definitely used social media in a way few national politicians had before. And every politician moving forward is going to have to do so. We've got to figure out what's fair game. Facebook is repeatedly looking like Flatfooted Book in this respect.

 

Yes, we know this. They were a pioneer of using social media, data and micro targeting. They also did not steal data and did it the honorable, legal, and right way. None of that is true with Cambridge Analytica.

 

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli...-mccabe-facebook-aleksandr-kogan-trump-russia

Jared Kushner, who was charged with overseeing Trump’s digital operations, is the reason Cambridge Analytica joined the Trump campaign.

Kushner hired a man named Brad Parscale, a Texas-based digital expert who had worked previously for team Trump. Cambridge Analytica convinced Parscale to “try out the firm.” The decision was reinforced by Trump’s campaign manager, Steve Bannon, who is also a former vice president of Cambridge Analytica, who was also funded by the Mercer family, a huge donor to the Trump 2016 campaign

btw, recently Trump picked Parscale to head his 2020 campaign​

 

DIRTY CRIME FAMILY.....burn em all.

DD

 

Yes I am more than comfortable with the assertion that Trump is dirtier and sleazier than Hillary which is why I and 3 million more people voted for her over him.

That being said... yes she’s a career politician who has no problem getting her hands dirty and has issues with the truth. But she’s nothing compared to Trump. If you can’t see that then you’re living in a fantasy land.

Or maybe you were so obsessed with Hillary Clinton who lost the election 18 months ago that you missed stories like the one where Trump F-ed a p*rn star 5 months after his wife gave birth, silenced her a month before the election with bribery, and has physically threatened her to stay silent as recent as two weeks ago.

Yeah... Hillary is just as sleazy. Keep living that FoxNews fantasy.

 

it has also been marketing the harvested data to other co and governments; this beckons the question

did Cambridge Analytica sell its harvested data to the Russian troll farm / Wikileaks ?

,​

btw,

in addition to the Trump 2016 Presidential campaign, Cambridge staff, comprised mostly of young Brits and Canadians, also
work in the 2014 midterm elections. Staff claim Cambridge Analytica ignored US ban on foreigners working on elections https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-non-american-employees-political​

 

I am concerned that people are conflating stuff to make this Cambridge Analytica story feel more sinister than it is. Which is not to say there's no problem, because I think there is, but it is easy to lump in the discomfort of big data analytics with the actual accusations against the company. Lots of companies are engaged in doing big data analytics on people's data. I'm sure Facebook has a whole department doing this. The first problem for CA as I understand it is that they "stole" this data by asking for it for "academic research" and then commercializing it. That's essentially a contract dispute issue for CA. For Facebook users, their beef should be with Facebook who didn't protect them, not CA. The second problem is that they had foreign nationals working on US elections. I guess it's illegal, and probably for good reason, but not by itself an accusation of malice, more like a process crime. The thing that makes people squirm though, that a company is analyzing information they volunteered to know how to politically manipulate them -- that's legal. If we don't like that, we don't need to go after CA and the Trump campaign, we need to go after Facebook, Google, and these other 'new economy' companies that collect data on us and decide themselves who gets to use it.

 

ur just talking about one branch of the harvested tree.

~ 270 K Facebook users volunteered, CA mined their profile to steal their FB friends' ( who didn't volunteered ) profiles.
from that one branch of 270K FB profiles, CA harvested it to be ~50 M profiles. CA stole ~ 49.7 M FB profiles, 81% of the harvested data,

 

It seems to me that there are two issues here, one short-term and one long-term. In the short term, you'll see partisans like @Commodore try and say "but what about Obama" without addressing the substance of Cambridge Analytica's tactics. Even though Commodore could make an interesting point about how political campaigns have leveraged social media over time and across ideologies, we know that he isn't because of his lengthy posting history. He doesn't care about anything improper because he likes the end result. His criticism also ignores that voter targeting in 2008 ≠ voter targeting in 2016. Facebook is not the same product that it was 10 years ago. The short-term is about how these platforms have been leveraged in recent political campaigns.

The long-term issue is that we've willingly given up our lives to the black boxes of the tech world. Cambridge Analytica acquired 50 million individual datasets because people wanted to take quizzes more than they wanted to read terms and conditions. We've decided that we care more about mindlessly clicking through photos and finding comfortable, fuzzy ideological bubbles full of like-minded individuals than we do about our privacy and our resistance to manipulation. Facebook's entire business model is dependent on making sure its users are hooked to the product. They will never do anything that jeopardizes their growth in daily active users. Never. Any initiatives to "clean up" their product will not be so severe that they turn off power users.

The genie has been let out of the bottle and I don't know that it's possible to put it back in. The first step is deleting Facebook. Yes, they'll have historic data about you. But you can at least stop giving it to them for the future.

 

Channel 4 exposé to be uploaded at 2:00 PM Houston time here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Channel4News/videos

 

Paragraphs, @JuanValdez , @dumbartonbass , paragraphs.

 

I remember a year ago when Cambridge Analytica was brought up, eyes would roll or glaze over and that Always Sunny Charlie string meme would be posted. Now we're here.