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Facebook Data Scam Latest Liberal Trump Coping Technique
CNN is reporting on the latest scandal stemming from the 2016 election,
Facebook is facing a crescendo of questions about how user data was harvested for political purposes, and for a second day investors dumped its stock over the risk the scandal poses to its business.
Some U.S. lawmakers are calling on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify. British members of Parliament are summoning Zuckerberg too. But for now he is remaining silent about the uproar.Investors are taking the matter seriously. Facebook stock had fallen about 5% for the day as of midday Tuesday, compounding a nearly 7% decline the day before. More than $50 billion has been wiped off Facebook’s market value this week.
The scandal erupted over the weekend when The New York Times and UK media reported that Cambridge Analytica tried to influence American voters using information improperly gleaned from 50 million Facebook users.
Color me skeptical on several fronts; this is not the first time the platform has been used by advertisers (both political and commercial) to try to influence its users. The entire point of Facebook is to harvest your data in order to monetize it. Companies and campaigns have been doing it for almost as long as the service has been around; and most recently, the Obama campaign did it too. The difference is, Facebook brass wanted them to.
Um, this admission from a 2012 Obama campaign staffer seems extremely newsworthy? pic.twitter.com/i172imjviF
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) March 19, 2018
Even with Facebook data being harvested and used by the Trump campaign, how crucial was that to Trump’s election?
Data analytics are important part of modern campaign. But, just one part. Most important are candidate quality and salient message. The best algorithms or 'psychological mapping' can't make up for bad candidates and bad message.
— amy walter (@amyewalter) March 20, 2018
Here’s the thing: Voters didn’t like Hillary Clinton. Trump had at least some messaging that resonated in important areas of the country and the Rust Belt delivered him the White House.
While the media and the Left (I repeat myself) obsess over this latest Facebook scandal, after over a year of pressing the Russian collusion narrative, it’s clear this is just becoming their main coping technique: denial. Donald Trump won, but only because he colluded with the Russians or because shady digital marketers used some sort of mind control to convince Americans to vote for him.
The simplest explanation is most often the correct one: Americans voted for Donald Trump because they wanted to. If the media and the Left want a different outcome in 2020, they would be best served trying to understand why Americans voted for him instead of crafting conspiracy theories to explain what is to them inexplicable.
Published in Technology
I’ve been able to get a liberal to admit as much in an unguarded moment.
–
ME: What would it take to convince you that Trump’s victory was legitimate?
HIM: You could convince me that there was no collusion if you had enough evidence, but I’m absolutely certain that the election was stolen.
ME: How much of your belief in the Russia stuff isn’t about evidence? How much is it just based on your belief that Trump is evil and you don’t want to think America could elect him?
HIM: Look, I want to think this is a good country. That’s why I have to believe the election was stolen.
Michael Doran was very poignant on this on Howie Carr. They are acting like idiots.
Oh, people thought it was brilliant in 2012 when Buraq Hussein did it.
Thanks for this post!
It’s not an act.
They change theories more often than they change their socks. It was Page, it was Popadopoulos, it was Prince. Christopher Steele is some kind of super-spy who only needs to call his sources in Russia and they will spill the Kremlin crown jewels about an operation years in the making despite the fact that Putin would have them killed if he even suspected that they had betrayed him. Now it’s micro-targeting, a method that is older than anyone reading this. They are using new methods of gathering the data, but the result is the same old schlock.
David Harsanyi had a good piece in The Federalist today: The Cambridge Analytica Panic Is The Silliest Conspiracy Of The Entire Russia Scare. I think hunting for “back-channels” is a trifle sillier, but he makes a good case.
“Denial” is one applicable term — another is “Projection.”
If even half of what is posited over at CTH/Conservative Tree House is true, the US should be less concerned about why there is a “School-to-Prison Pipeline” and more concerned about why there *isn’t* a more robust “Law-School-to-Prison Pipeline.”
Overnite trucker Radio show just said that there was an opinion piece in the New York Times last weekend that said that 40% of all Democrats still think the Russians change votes in our election computers. He couldn’t remember the name of the author.
So the liberal thinks we are a bad country. How telling.
I think these companies need to be recognized for what they are. They are not technology companies, they’re publishers. Facebook’s competition is not microsoft or intel but twitter and old media.
Also Obama’s use of big data got him elected in the first place, in 2008. Its the driving force of what Organizing for America did. Its also what broke the DNC, as Organizing for America did not move its data operation (and fundraising mechanics) into the DNC, but remained separate, as the big donors where being successfully maxed out by OfA and not the DNC.
Also Megan McCain on the view, had a good exchange on the view on this topic.
http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/20/mccain-facebook-biased-conservatives/
Bethany,
This is best short summation that I’ve read. Save it as this will be good for the next one and the next one and the…
Regards,
Jim
I have heard that this firm was only used by Trump during the primaries, and was also used by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in the 2015 Canadian Election.
I think the real scandal of the US elections, is how events and some candidates, conspired to make the primary season an adverse selection. Both parties selected the worst possible candidate. The democrats fixed their primaries so the most-established candidate could win in an anti-establishment, populist year – and republicans had too many losers with inflated egos. Had the egos stepped aside quickly, the anti-trump sentiments would not have been divided between 3 candidates. Trump would not have been the nominee. (as harsh as this assessment seems to be of the republican losers, at least they’re honest. They wanted to be the nominee and couldnt bring themselves to confront that reality even after the math made it impossible to win)