Add another log to the bonfire of Facebook controversy! A former staffer of Barack Obama’s admitted that the social media giant, Facebook, allowed the Obama campaign to break the user data rules because Facebook was “on their side.”
Yesterday, Facebook’s stock tanked after it was revealed that the social media giant gave user data to a firm, Global Science Research (GSR), via an app. This data was then given to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that was working for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. But it gets even worse. Facebook has been known to censor right-leaning voices and often has been a mouthpiece for the corporate media and leftist policies.
According to Townhall, some have noted a similar mining tool used by the Obama team, but they gathered information through their website (with permission from those who engaged) and the armies of volunteers, which was then matched with voter profiles. Yes, still a bit creepy, especially since the campaign boasted that they probably knew every single one of the 67+ million voters who supported President Obama in 2012.
Many have figured out that various social media platforms and Google itself have an inherent left-wing bias ingrained in the services. Well, one former data officer for the Obama campaign, Carol Davidsen, admitted that Facebook allowed them to break the rules because they were on their side.
First, she tweeted a Time magazine piece showing what the 2012 campaign did to gather information:
In the final weeks before Election Day, a scary statistic emerged from the databases at Barack Obama’s Chicago headquarters: half the campaign’s targeted swing-state voters under age 29 had no listed phone number. They lived in the cellular shadows, effectively immune to traditional get-out-the-vote efforts.
For a campaign dependent on a big youth turnout, this could have been a crisis. But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.
That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.” –Time
Davidsen then detailed on Twitter how representatives from the social media company were surprised how much data they mined, adding that they 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.”
They came to 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.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
Davidsen added that she’s 100% sure that Facebook recruits folks to handle the GOP side of things, but what is known with absolute certainty, is that the tech giant was willing to allow one campaign to break the rules because they agreed with their leftist and collectivized agenda.
What we have here is an admission from a Democratic campaign manager that the most powerful social media platform in the first world is currently lending its untold amounts of data to a specific political party’s purposes. This, folks, is what “election meddling” looks like.
