Gee thanks, Facebook

Does anyone understand this Cambridge Analytica / Facebook thing?  I think I've figured it out, and if it's what I think, it pegs my Stink-O-Meter!

It seems a few years ago Facebook began prohibiting companies from secretly mining information from Facebook users for commercial purposes.  They would, however, allow member mining for academic purposes.  That's when the geeks and financial backers of what became Cambridge Analytica combined efforts with a British academic who had a waiver to mine Facebook accounts and began their covert invasion of our privacy.

They offered an app to Facebook users whereby they could get a personality profile of themselves, and the offer was accepted by 270,000+/- people.  What they didn't realize was that Cam Anal (appropriate acronym) also gained access to all their friends, and their friend's friends, and their friend's friend's friends, etc.  They could then see how many "likes" and "angry" responses they left on which stories, and over time establish a profile of them all.  For example, if someone consistently "liked" stories on gun control or immigration reform, they were deemed liberal.  "Liked" views on ICE roundups or our terrible trade deficits were deemed conservative.  They eventually knew more about individual Facebook users than their spouses did, or so they claimed.

Eventually Cam Anal *snicker* developed a very good idea of what 40-50 MILLION Americans thought about various issues.  They were able to micro-analyze individual towns and even precincts. 

Here's where it gets sticky:  The major financial backer for all this was the ultra-conservative Mercer family, the same Mercer's who funded Breitbart and Steve Bannon.  They even made Bannon a VP at Cam Anal.  (Steve Bannon eventually became a senior advisor to Donald Trump.)  Cam Anal then began marketing themselves to like-minded conservative candidates such as Ted Cruz and later, Donald Trump.  Then they kicked it up a notch by trying to influence voters by putting out bogus news stories (aka Fake News) to Facebook users that were read and "liked" and "shared" by their friends, over and over.

I remember seeing one from a veteran who told of how Donald Trump's Tower Air once sent a plane to pick up stranded soldiers in the Mideast after the Gulf War, and how he will always be grateful to Trump for his kind gesture.  Knowing something about the airline biz, my BS meter shot up.  I checked it out and found it was totally false.  Trump never had an interest in Tower Air at all.  He did own the short-lived Trump Shuttle, but they never transported soldiers home from overseas.  (You can read about it for yourself here.)

By using tricks like this they were able to identify disgruntled / undecided voters in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio in particular, and flip (some of) these historically Democratic voters to Donald Trump in the general election.  Cam Anal determined what they wanted to hear, and then put out fake news stories to pull them in.

The plot thickens:  enter the conspiracy theorists. Remember a few months ago when Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 individuals and several companies in Russia for interfering in our 2016 election?  They were accused of planting fake stories on a micro-level, much of it aimed at the same voters in PA, MI, and OH that Cam Anal / Trump were also targeting.  How did they know which micro-level voters to target unless they were receiving guidance from Cam Anal / Trump?  If that connection can be made by Mueller, that's the collusion smoking gun he's been looking for.

Evidence suggests Facebook knew of this privacy violation several years earlier and did nothing about it.  Cam Anal says they deleted all this illegally obtained information long ago, but now a whistle blower, one of the original founders of the company, says not true.  He says that personal info WAS the company.  Without that, they would have nothing to offer to potential customers.

Gee thanks, Facebook!

S

How could this happen?

Any school kid has seen pictures like this of pre-WWII Germany where hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans flocked to get even a glimps of Adolf Hitler as he promised to pull them out of the hard times they were in.  

"How could this happen?  Didn't they see Hitler for the hateful madman he was?"  

Well, no, not really.  Hitler inflamed even the slightest prejudices most people had and convinced them better times were ahead if only they would trust him.  Prejudices against Jews of course, and the mentally and physically handicapped, and Slavs, and pretty much everyone who had it better than they did, too. 

"Times were simpler then, and people were just very naive.  That could never happen today.  We're much better educated and too sophisticated to fall for anything like that."

Really?  Have you not seen FOX News, or MSNBC, or read Breitbart or Huff Post or any number of other slanted sources of information?  We all have our prejudices, and there is one group or another out there looking for you, hoping to turn you into one of their disciples.  IMO we're even MORE susceptible today of falling into the camp of one evil group or another than Germans were back in the 1930's.

Examples?  President Trump has his "base", those who refuse to believe anything at all negative about him.  Any evidence of a tainted election victory is just sour grapes, "flip-flopping" on issues is just his way of keeping his opponents off balance, etc.  They have tasted his brand of Kool Aid and apparently loved it.  They aren't going back.

Then you have the anti-Trumpsters who can find absolutely nothing good to say about the President.  Everything he says is dismissed out of hand.  THEY are always right, and HE is always wrong.  More Kool Aid consumed.  They aren't going back.

Antisemitism is still with us.  Racial tensions are flaring...White Supremacists, Antifa...Charlottsville was NOT spontaneous.  Protestants still view Catholics warily.  My generation looks unfavorably at today's kids and their dress, music, attitudes, etc.  Gay/straight, Believers/atheists, stand or take a knee...the issues, and ardent followers of each, are almost endless.  And however they might believe, they are unlikely to ever go back.  Some believe those who own guns are just a bunch of knuckle-dragging, Tea Party bubbas.  Umm...I own guns, and I am ANYTHING but a knuckle-dragging, Tea Party bubba.  Ewww!  *Oops, even I have prejudices*

My point is, we are NOT too sophisticated to fall prey to being radicalized.  If you think you're too smart to fall for such shenanigans, they're probably already reeling you in.  Apparently we haven't learned the old lesson of history repeating itself.  I hope this ends better than last time.

S