Obama’s Campaign Exploited Private Information And Never Paid The Price

On Friday, Facebook made an announcement that would contribute to a sizable decline in their stock price this week; the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which has been hyped as being integral to President Trump’s election win, was suspended from the social network for using data collected improperly from Facebook users.

But first, to answer a pressing question – what the heck is “Cambridge Analytica”?

Cambridge Analytica performs data analysis, mostly for political campaigns. The firm promises their clients “insights into consumer or voter behavior,” and “insights into behavioral psychology.” The company is partly owned by Robert Mercer, a conservative and Trump supporter.

The firm initially provided data services for Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and later, Trump.

Ironically, nobody in the media seemed to mind when the Obama campaign did essentially the same thing.

According to the Daily Wire:

In a series of tweets on Sunday, Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, explained how the campaign was able to mine Facebook’s data in a way that employees for the company suggested they “wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”

“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,” she wrote. “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,” she added later. She also noted that she is “100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side.”

The difference here is that the Obama campaign was doing the sketchy data mining, while in the case of the Trump campaign, it was a third party.

Maxine Waters even bragged about it. “The president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That’s going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before,” she said about Obama’s reelection.

To better illustrate the media hypocrisy, let’s look at how they covered Cambridge Analytica, versus Obama.

Here’s the coverage of Cambridge:

And now, Obama doing the same:

One is “exploitation,” while another is genius.

If the media didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.

Share if you’re sick of the biased treatment of Conservative companies in today’s Facebook-driven era!