So-called victim Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook regulated after the overblown crisis that has arisen over the use of Facebook member data by Cambridge Analytica. Analytica is tied to the wealthy conservative Mercers and, at one point, Steve Bannon. That is the only reason people care that they mined data of people without their knowledge.
No one is talking about Barack Obama doing the exact same thing in 2012.
IJR reported that Carol Davidson, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America [OFA], said Facebook discovered their campaign was misusing Facebook to massively mine user data by “sucking out the whole social graph.” They allowed it because they agreed with OFA.
Like Cambridge Analytica, Obama for America was able to look at a user’s friend list once they applied for the Obama campaign. The campaign then used the data to append their email list. It was called “targeted sharing.”
An insider at Facebook named Sandy Parakilas told the Guardian he found it “horrifying” that numerous companies deployed these techniques used by Analytica, possibly affecting hundreds of millions of Facebook users.
It wasn’t only Cambridge or OFA mining data, it was numerous companies.
Between 2011 and 2012, Parakilas was one of the software engineers policing possible third-party breaches. He found these flaws and warned the senior management they risked serious breaches.
No one cared.
So why would Zuckerberg want Facebook and other social media platforms regulated? For one thing, he has plenty of money and doesn’t have to worry about financial security, but, still, why do it?
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Reason.com has the answer — it locks in his position.
Zuckerberg is pushing for regulation.
“The question,” he told Wired‘s Nicholas Thompson, “isn’t ‘Should there be regulation or shouldn’t there be?’ It’s ‘How do you do it?'” On CNN, he said, “I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated. I think in general technology is an increasingly important trend in the world. I think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than ‘yes or no should we be regulated?'”
WHY WOULD ZUCKERBERG WANT REGULATION?
Reason’s Nick Gillespie writes: …Zuckerberg is using these incidents as a way to cement Facebook’s centrality in a radically volatile social-media landscape.
He has been losing younger users. Zuckerberg knows what happened to MySpace and Friendster. They disappeared and he could too.
If he supports it and even embraces and shapes the regulation, it will ensure his longevity. It will also ensure more censorship.
Censorship
Facebook is currently guaranteeing only real news will appear on the pages and so is Google. The real news to them is mainstream fake news.
Keep in mind that the left always wants to censor the right in the media. It’s not the other way around.
Make no mistake, regulation will further limit Conservative and Libertarian influence on Facebook. Cambridge Analytica is being made into a criminal organization that did something unusual and took advantage of poor Zuckerberg.
The algorithm changes have disproportionately harmed conservative publishers, tech website The Outline concluded in a lengthy report earlier in March. Conservative and right-wing publishers “were hit the hardest” by the algorithm change, the report found, “while the engagement numbers of most predominantly liberal publishers remained unaffected.”
Do believe the right is being censored — check out my graph since the censorship algorithm has been employed on Facebook.
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