The Goldwater
April 13, 2018
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress Tuesday but the hearing was far from achieving any meaningful headway.
Most of Zuckerberg’s responses included “I’ll have my team follow up with you on that,” or “I’ll have to check with my team.” The answers that didn’t involve referring to his team saw Zuckerberg citing the company’s basic policy and functions. In reality, the questions posed by most of the Senators revealed they did not truly understand how the platform worked. One Senator did manage to scrape at the heart of the issue when he referred to the 2012 Obama campaign’s use of Facebook to win the election and that is where the true hypocrisy of this hearing lies.
When you take a look at what spurred this hearing, it was largely put in motion by the Cambridge Analytica scandal where a third party was able to glean data about users in order to target them with political ads. In reality was not even a scandal, it wasn’t even anything new that hasn’t been done for years. In fact, the Obama campaign used Facebook to gain a massive political advantage by doing exactly what Cambridge Analytica did and the Obama campaign’s media director even bragged about it and confirmed Facebook was aware of it. Let’s take a look at exactly what down and why the current hearing spurred by the alleged misuse of the social media platform in favor of the Trump campaign is such a farce.
The former media director for the Obama administration’s presidential campaign Carol Davidsen confirmed recently on Twitter that the campaign used massive amounts of user’s personal information to their advantage on here is what she said. “Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing,” Davidsen said. “They came to office in the days following…