The Cambridge Analytica scandal has Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the ropes. It turns out that the rogue company probably used questionnaire data in order to provide metrics for the Donald Trump For President campaign in 2016. After many years of privacy concerns, Facebook and other social media companies are finally facing the realistic possibility that they will face actual government regulation to protect consumers’ privacy. But can a leopard really change its spots?
Nice Apology, Mark
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Piss off the greatest security state in the world history of surveilled societies and speak face to face, unmediated by any and all electronically monitored and recorded media.
So the real crime here is that Cambridge Analytica used the data without paying for it it’s not like Facebook wasn’t collecting it anyway.
I don’t like FB, I don’t use FB, but neither can I bring myself to condemn Zuckerberg. It’s right there in the EULA you didn’t bother to read – FB collects your data for marketing and ::mumble:: purposes. If that wasn’t enough to warn you off, then you deserve what you get.
I do have a mostly-unused FB account under an assumed name (& with an unrecognizable picture.) I tried to sign up for pizza delivery using that account – I got a message saying “We’ll tell Papa Mackenzie about all your friends” – WTF??!! I wouldn’t want *my* friends giving my info away, neither am I going to give theirs to a third party; I bailed out and used a “telephone” to place my order.
Yeah, our GOP Congress is going to jump right on that- can’t have anybody using shady tactics to help them to get re-elected, now can they?
The government only cares what you think.
When it says it’s fixed and people think it is fixed, then everything is “better” even if nothing has been changed.
If the people believe everything the government says then the greatest enemy of the people will be the people themselves.
We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.
As usual, the main-stream media is frantically pushing the distraction from the real story.
Trump hired a NON-USA entity to meddle in the 2016 election all right. However, contrary to the only allowable interpretation, that entity, Cambridge Analytica (CA), is located in Great Britain, “our good ally.” Note, Great Britain is NOT Russia.
CA claims to have made, for His Hairness’s account, ten-times more electronic “impressions or views” than the total number of votes cast for all US presidential candidates in 2016. Link (from 9Nov2017) follows. Copy & paste into address bar: tinyurl.com/ya69rdou
Apparently, not all foreign persons or entities are forbidden to meddle in US elections but only those specified by the DNC (aka “the Clinton machine”). That is, those that have the best chance of bringing $$$’s into her campaign coffers.
And a better media distraction, admittedly, would be difficult to find.
The furor is Facebook, the vehicle by which about a third of the world’s population self-reports to the US surveillance state.
The distraction is the existence of Facebook’s information (“who EVER could have known!!!”) but certainly NOT how … and by whom, it was used … precisely because it was not Russia-linked
This information was publicly available at least since last November (link, above). How could Mr Mueller, investigator extraordinaire (and hero of “the Resistance”[sic]), possibly have missed it? Is he totally incompetent or is he hoaxing the American public once again (in the same way, for the same motive) as when he contributed, as FBI Chief, to the grand fraud of Iraq WMDs?
PS: Some two-thirds of Americans self-report via Facebook – about twice as many as voted in the 2016 presidential election. One wonders what fraction of these are constantly calling other persons “sheeple.”
Yet another proof – as if any were needed – that those dastardly Russians «hacked» the US presidential elections of 2016. I mean, who’s going to let himself be fooled by a transparent ploy like the name Alexander James Ashburner Nix, which is obviously one of former KGB agent (there, I’ve said it !) Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s more frequently employed pseudonyms ?…
Henri
If not a pseudonym, at least an undercover Russki spy.
As such, Nix was probably the one who gassed the Russian dissident, Skripal, shortly before the Russian presidential election to boost the chances of his boss, Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin.
There is no PRVF that Cambridge Analytica did anything wrong. All we’ve got is some words from Facebook and the government. We have already determined that everything those entities say about the election is a lie.
Ergo: CA most assuredly did NOT do a bad thing.
(However, if they did – it would show that the Trump campaign was indeed willing to use foreign hackers to fight dirty in the campaign. But since we’ve already determined that’s an absurd notion, it is actually yet more PRVF that CA did not do a bad thing.)
You have CA’s own boasts of what they did.
I case you missed the article, the link:
tinyurl.com/ya69rdou
I did not use/see the word “wrong” anywhere. The point is that CA did no more or less than the vile Russkis have been ACCUSED of.
Conversely, in this matter, wrong is only what HRC & DNC say it is. Independent of those two scurrilous entities, it is difficult to conceive of anything that could be considered “wrong” in a US presidential election, given US campaign finance “law” and the the Citizens United ruling … except, of course, being Russia or Russian.
That His Hairness could NOT commit election crime is the absurd notion. I said, directly to you a couple weeks ago: “I’d suggest that His Hairness’s crime was to employ Cambridge Analytica (CA) to influence USA voters.” CA has confirmed and admitted it.
You ignored it then and you’re trying to ignore it now.
I’m afraid you’ve missed the point. I have no doubt that CA is guilty. The above post is intended as satire.
The deniers demand a much, much higher standard of “proof” for DastardlyRussiansGate than they do any other aspect of politics. (an informal fallacy called “Moving the goalposts”) I’m merely applying deniers’ own arguments to DastardlyAnalyticaGate.
e.g. POTUSJR has already confirmed and admitted to influence peddling. You ignored it then and you’re trying to ignore it now.
re: “I have no doubt that CA is guilty.”
As I implied below – they are guilty only of violating their contractual agreement with Facebook. They may be liable for damages to FB’s business, but they are certainly not guilty of treason.
CA may have *bragged* that they had a lot of influence over the election, but where is the PRVF? According to this forum, it doesn’t matter unless someone can mathematically prove* that CA’s alleged actions were a major contributor Hillary’s loss.
*”PRVVE”? I don’t know these things …