It has been a bad week for Facebook. The media makes it seem as if Cambridge Analytica hijacked Facebook and stole user data to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election. So let’s look at facts not agenda.
In reality, what Cambridge Analytica did for the Trump campaign was the same thing the Obama campaign did with Facebook’s data to win the 2008 election. Analytica’s crime? Target and reach out to likely voters using data supplied by Facebook. Given Facebook’s political leanings, it went the extra mile in 2008 to help Obama in how to understand and utilize Facebook’s immense power to run his campaign.
Facebook is the ultimate marketing tool. It allows users to segregate themselves by gender, education, preferences and a myriad of other categories that help marketers target and sell to select consumers. Pollsters and campaign managers are just the latest group to harness Facebook’s power to, in their case, target voters.
When Obama was successful employing these strategies he was lauded for his intellect and savvy for taping the internet to obtain voters. Yet, when Trump then employed the same strategies, he has been criticized for stealing users’ data.
Both campaigns did the same thing; yet, only Trump has been serially denounced for the tactic. In addition Facebook, once the darling of mainstream media, has now come under intense scrutiny for the way it gathers and secures (or doesn’t secure!) user data.
What makes this story particularly interesting is that Facebook is admittedly owned and operated by Leftist and Progressives who, at every turn, try to edit and limit Conservative news stories. Still, the backlash continues and will continue because Facebook does not operate under the purview of government.
All major new channels and radio stations need a license to transmit or broadcast.. Along with the license, these stations have an implied responsibility to the public at large. In addition, if these stations ever run afoul of the law, or find themselves outside the good graces of government officials, there is always the threat of losing their licensing.
But websites and internet portals need no such license. Just think about the power that these licenses, doled out by the government, have on news channels and the consequent restriction of free speech. For example, when the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal broke, Newsweek and other outlets had the story. However, they did not publish it. It was the Drudge Report, a small site at the time, which broke the story that led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
So, even though Facebook has all its Leftist credentials in place, it still isn’t enough. The government and well established media companies don’t like the fact that Facebook gets all of their content for free and is able to distribute it in the way it sees fit. Further, they don’t like the fact, that many Right wing blogs and Conservative web sites distribute content on their platform.
Much of the “Fake News” and its aftermath are clearly targeted at Facebook for allowing all of this “Conservative” content to be SO freely distributed. So as much as Facebook goes out of its way to appease its critics, silence some Conservative voices and stamp out “Fake News”… it will never be enough.
Jeff Bezos figured out the media/political game fairly quickly by buying the Washington Post. That publication is licensed by the government and so gives Bezos the credibility to use the paper to curry favor with the government overlords. It writes stories favorable to his masters while not investigating stories detrimental to the political class. So far, this strategy has been a huge success for Bezos and The Post..
I see no reason for such optimism where Facebook is concerned.. Whatever Facebook tries to do do will never be enough for its critics. Even though Facebook has shut down and restricted the content of Conservative voices such as Denis Prager, Mark Dice and yes, even Alex Jones… this has still not satiated the demands of its critics.
What the Left truly wants is the total capitulation by Facebook such that it becomes a regulated entity controlled by the government whereby all content is filtered and edited by them.
The Left used to be the champion of free speech; but, the “safe space” movement — where some speech is so vulgar it can’t be allowed — was birthed out of the Left. Now, the true endgame of the Left, for Facebook, is to silence the dissenting voices that occupy the political landscape.
Facebook’s crime of allowing access to consumer information seems laughable, and small, when compared to the well documented and enormous crimes of the Bush and Obama Administrations for the surveillance state they created. The crackdown on Facebook, using its affiliation with Cambridge Analytica, is just the latest ruse by the government to feign outrage and divert attention from the real goal: silencing dissent.
Steve