I don’t think you have to be a conspiracy theorist to find this weird.
Facebook has been aggressively monetizing user data for years. They are just one player in an entire industry built around this business model.
The existence of this industry is most obvious to technically literate, who you can generally identify by their use of strong ad blockers and password managers. But it’s been reported on before [0]. Online privacy is not a new concern... just look at the “Facebook is listening to me” meme.
So what I want to know is: why now? Why Cambridge Analytica? Why Facebook?
Here’s my best take so far.
1) Facebook’s user base is so big that it’s a relevant political constituency, and thus democratic governments have a reason to care.
2) Facebook creates an expectation of privacy and illusion of control that doesn’t exist with public-first platforms like Twitter
3) Cambridge Analytica is a scummy company in many respects, not just their work with Facebook data. They got lots of Facebook data from a third party who probably wasn’t authorized to sell it to them. This makes them a good candidate for regulators to make an example of.
4) Cambridge Analytica is closely tied to the Trump and Brexit campaigns, both of which are regarded as “dangerous perversions of democracy using lies to exploit vulnerable people” by exactly the kinds of political and media organizations that are driving this story.
Overall, I think this is a “Pigs get fat, Hogs get slaughtered” situation. The industry’s toxic practices are finally causing enough damage that institutions responsible for protecting the public (government, real media) are responding.
No but in the grand scheme of things, things like the Yemen Civil War that has been ongoing since 2015 has gotten less attention in our media than a single Donald Trump tweet.
The plain number of articles on a topic is not a useful measure for their impact. A dozen newsticker reports will be remembered less than a single frontpage article.
I would be optimistic if most Americans actually read the BBC ( or read, for that matter). I would venture to say most however, do not. For example, a popular right wing propaganda news source that most Americans watch has had a handful of articles this year, and skimpy coverage on air.
Do you find it hard to believe that an organization based in the UK, and citizens of that union, are more interested in whats going in Yemen than an organization based in the US, and of course the citizens of that union.
I know whats happening in Yemen, I've read the facts, and now I don't care anymore. I don't want to see it in the news everyday because it wasn't relevant to me when I read about it and it has practically zero chance of every being relevant to me.
What Trump said about xxx person at yyy place is varying degrees of relevant to my life, all of those degrees more so than Yemen.
If Fox had a large Middle Eastern demographic that it's advertisers cared about, you would see Yemen Nightly at 7:30 without question.
> Do you find it hard to believe that an organization based in the UK, and citizens of that union, are more interested in whats going in Yemen than an organization based in the US, and of course the citizens of that union.
Yes, because on the other side of that conflict is the Saudis, who are one of our biggest "allys", and of course, the other side of the coin is the general hypocrisy of caring what goes on in other parts of the world and not this one because it doesn't fit a specific narrative.
> What Trump said about xxx person at yyy place is varying degrees of relevant to my life, all of those degrees more so than Yemen.
I don't know how to not say this in a disrespectful way, but I really feel sad for you on a personal level if that's truly what you think. I have a feeling that you are just attempting to be a contrarian in this instance.
Not at all. Just media's desperate hunger for any story that paints Trump in a bad light. The recent video evidence on Cambridge Analytica shows that they were at least shady in their operations. But their approach to targeting voters and scraping Facebook userdata would have been described as brilliant data wizzardry if it were done for the other side.
You can perform brilliant data wizardry without deceiving people. Micro-targeting has been around since the 60s. There is a huge gulf between finding people receptive to an ad whose content you publicly endorse and creating astroturf sites and fake news content to manipulate people's world view.
I keep seeing comments which equating cheating and cleverness. If I win a chess game by moving making illegal moves this is not a sign of my brilliance. If you can't distinguish brilliant play from cheating, perhaps you don't understand the game.
When we do it it's awesome, when they do it it's a data breach, it's a privacy violation, it's a breach of trust, and it requires government regulation.
It was also described as "groundbreaking", a "game changer", and "an application that will change the way campaigns are conducted in the future" [1].
When Obama's campaign did it, it was heralded as the future of democracy. Even the social media director for Obama's 2012 campaign acknowledges that they did the exact same thing that CA is being blasted for now [2]. I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes other than people just wanting to suppress the truth.
... the campaign literally knew every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex and income.
...the digital-analytics team, led by Rayid Ghani, a 35-year-old research scientist from Accenture Labs, developed an idea: Why not try sifting through self-described supporters’ Facebook pages in search of friends who might be on the campaign’s list of the most persuadable voters? Then the campaign could ask the self-identified supporters to bring their undecided friends along.
...They started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information.
So, they used Facebook data, including "Friends" lists and personal information that those "Friends" had never directly consented to providing to the campaign.
[1] How did Facebook react to the much larger data harvesting of the Obama campaign? The New York Times reported it out, in a feature hailing Obama’s digital masterminds:
The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said [Will] St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ "
In other words, Silicon Valley is just making up the rules as they go along. Some large-scale data harvesting and social manipulation is okay until the election. Some of it becomes not okay in retrospect. They sigh and say okay so long as Obama wins. When Clinton loses, they effectively call a code red.
Really brutal how unashamed they have become about their biases. No wonder people are getting so angry against the media and big tech while those still play the facade of a fair game.
Did you actually even read your own link? I don't think it says what you think it says. That story you linked is about how democrats in 2006 wanted to do more data collection but couldn't agree on whether it should be the DNC or a private firm that did the data collection. The one thing they could agree on was that data collection was something they should be doing.
The post I was commenting on claimed similar actions were, or would have been lauded if carried out by Democrats. I simply posted an article critical of similar moves.
