Obama's
Former Campaign Director Makes Bombshell Claim: Facebook Was "On
Our Side"
20
March, 2018
The
recent controversy and escalating scandal over Facebook's decision to
ban Trump-linked political data firm Cambridge Analytica over the use
of data harvested through a personality app under the guise of
academic research has opened a veritable Pandora's box of scandal for
the Silicon Valley social media giant.
Carol
Davidsen, who served as Obama's director
of integration and
media analytics during his 2012 campaign (in her LinkedIn
profile she
says she was responsible for "The Optimizer" &
"Narwhal" big data analytics platforms), claims - with
evidence, that Facebook found out about a massive data-mining
operation they were conducting to "suck out the whole social
graph" in order to target potential voters. After Facebook found
out, they knowingly allowed them to continue doing it because
they were supportive of the campaign.
"[M]ore
than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the [Facebook-based
app] gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend
lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young
voters. Roughly
85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the
uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way
to reach them," reads
an article Davidsen
posted as a prelude to her postings.
In
a series of Sunday night tweets, Davidsen explained how the Obama
campaign was able to use Facebook data to "append to our email
lists."
An example of how we used that data to append to our email lists.
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.
Facebook
even "came to office in the days following election recruiting &
were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have
allowed someone else to do because
they were on our side."
They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
I worked on all of the data integration projects at OFA. This was the only one that felt creepy, even though we played by the rules, and didn’t do anything I felt was ugly, with the data.
Facebook scandal widens: Obama campaign's Carol Davidsen admits Democrats sucked out "the entire social network of the US", kept the data and still have it.youtube.com/watch?v=LGiiQU…
Cambridge
Analytica bought data harvested using a personality
app called "thisisyourdigitallife," created by two
psychology professors. When CA was asked to stop and delete all
of the harvested data, they did - however Facebook banned
Cambridge Analytics and their parent company SCL after an
anonymous source which Facebook won't disclose reported that not all
of the data had been deleted.
So
the 2012 Obama campaign was scraping data from Facebook, got
caught, and
was specifically told they were allowed to do things "they
wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because
they were on our side."
Davidsen
then tweeted "I am also 100% positive that Facebook activity
recruits and staffs people that are on the other side."
I am also 100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side.
Turns
out one of the two founding directors of Global Science Research
(GSR), which sold the data to Cambridge Analytics, is employed
by Facebook!
Joseph Chancellor was one of two founding directors of Global Science Research (GSR), the company that harvested Facebook data using a personality app under the guise of academic research and later shared the data with Cambridge Analytica.
He was hired to work at Facebook as a quantitative social psychologist around November 2015, roughly two months after leaving GSR, which had by then acquired data on millions of Facebook users.
Chancellor is still working as a researcher at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in California, where psychologists frequently conduct research and experiments using the company’s vast trove of data on more than 2 billion users. -The Guardian.
And as the broader public
has merely scratched the surface of the tangled webs politicized
social media platforms weave, Facebook's Chief Security Officer has
already decided to get the hell out of dodge. One can only imagine
what some real digging would unveil.
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