The Facebook spy issue

The Facebook spy issue - Bill Wilson -

www.dailyjot.com

 

Breezing through the news cycle pretty quickly is Facebook. Facebook was part and parcel to a data mining (sic spying) application developed and used by the immediate past "president." The working model collected information on Facebook users that would be valuable to the "president's" election campaign. In 2012, Facebook even expressed surprise that the "president's" campaign was "able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized what we were doing...because they were on our side," the campaign's director of media analytics, Carol Davidson, tweeted with a link to a talk she gave on how Facebook allowed the campaign to harvest data across friends networks.

 

The App took information given in response to how users set up their Facebook account and whether they allowed Facebook to share individual friends. The App recorded, analyzed and utilized the information in messaging, categorizing voters, and reaching specific demographics. Prior to vehicles such as Facebook, campaigns did this by calling people on the phone and asking them questions. That method of polling, however, wasn't sneaky or spy-like because the voter gave permission up front to take the survey. Facebook allowed itself to be used by the Democratic "president" because it was a business that supported the policies of his administration. So rather than keep the public trust, Facebook sold out to its collective political beliefs.

 

And, in the meantime, Russian operatives were also using Facebook to propagate false stories about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Facebook was suppressing the bad stuff about Clinton, and allowing the negatives on Trump. The New York Times reported that Facebook's Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos was actually tracking down the Russian trolls and trying to uncover them. The Times reported that Facebook Chief Operations Officer Sheryl Sandberg opposed Stamos's work and tried to cover up his exposure of the Russian's election shenanigans. According to Law&crime.com, Facebook pressured the Times to remove the cover up language in its online stories. Stamos also has been reassigned to another job. Antitrust and collusion questions are now being raised between the Times and Facebook.

 

Also, the Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytics to collect information from Facebook users through surveys, unlike the previous "president" who developed an App for this data mining. But since it's a Trump-hired organization, Facebook is now feigning that the Trump campaign spied on Americans using Facebook. Democratic lawmakers are saying the Trump campaign used Facebook data wrongly, despite the clear fact that the Democratic Party, the New York Times, and Facebook colluded in a dark web data-mining scheme and cover up. This is just another example of people accusing others of exactly what the accuser has done. As Ephesians 5:12 says of these unfruitful works of darkness, "For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret." May they all be exposed to the light.