Meta, the parent company of Facebook, agreed to pay $725 million Thursday to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the social media platform of allowing third parties like British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access user data without consent.
The social media giant resolved the four-year lawsuit after it was discovered that Cambridge Analytica had amassed data on 87 million Facebook users.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs called the proposed settlement &#8220;the largest recovery ever achieved in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to resolve a private class action,&#8221; NBC News <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-parent-meta-agrees-pay-725-million-settle-cambridge-analytica-rcna63081">reported</a>.
&#8220;This historic settlement will provide meaningful relief to the class in this complex and novel privacy case,&#8221; Derek Loeser and Lesley Weaver, the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, said in a joint statement to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/facebook-parent-meta-pay-725-mln-settle-lawsuit-relating-cambridge-analytica-2022-12-23/">Reuters</a>.
Plaintiffs accused Facebook of granting &#8220;numerous third parties access to their Facebook content and information without their consent, and that Facebook failed to adequately monitor the third parties&#8217; access to, and use of, that information,&#8221; according to the law firm.
Lawyers estimated that between 250 and 280 million people could be eligible for payments as part of the class action settlement, CNN <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/23/tech/meta-cambridge-analytica-settlement/index.html">reported</a>.
Meta reportedly did not admit to any wrongdoing as part of the settlement. However, a spokesperson said the company pursued resolving the lawsuit as it was in the &#8220;best interest&#8221; of its community and shareholders.
&#8220;Over the last three years we revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program. We look forward to continuing to build services people love and trust with privacy at the forefront,&#8221; Meta spokesperson Dina Luce said in a statement to CNN.
Judges in the Northern District of California will now have to approve the settlement.
Cambridge Analytica has since ceased operations after allegedly gaining personal information from millions of Facebook accounts without consent for voter profiling and targeting purposes.
Facebook previously agreed to a $5 billion privacy settlement in 2019 with the US Federal Trade Commission and a $100 million settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations that the company misled investors about the risks of misusing user data.

In this photo illustration a Cambridge Analytica logo seen

Facebook’s Parent Company Settles Cambridge Analytica Lawsuit For $725 Million

Facebook's Parent Company Settles Cambridge Analytica Lawsuit For $725 Million

Big Tech

Cambridge Analytica

Facebook

U.S.

The U.K. government has ended an investigation into the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and its affiliate SCL Group, finding scant evidence suggesting either worked illicitly with Russia to influence British and U.S. elections.
The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) released its <a href="https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-taken/2618383/20201002_ico-o-ed-l-rtl-0181_to-julian-knight-mp.pdf">findings</a> from the investigation on Tuesday, wrapping up a three-year probe and closing another avenue for allegations that Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election tilted results to President Trump. The findings also debunked assertions that Russian interference skewed the results of the British referendum to leave the European Union.
Cambridge Analytica was embroiled in scandal in 2018 when it was found to have amassed data on tens of millions of Facebook users. Allegations swirled that the consulting firm had used that data at the behest of Russian officials to target U.S. voters with misinformation to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Trump.
Congress called CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify on his social media platform’s privacy and data-sharing policies that year. Tech journalists, left-wing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbLyTqPweQg">pundits</a>, Democratic officials, and others dove into the scandal, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html">reporting and pushing</a> assertions that Cambridge Analytica worked with Kremlin-backed agents to spread Russian misinformation on Facebook. Allegations also swirled that Cambridge Analytica had obtained the data from Facebook illegally.
U.K. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham effectively <a href="https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/10/06/1602008755000/ICO-s-final-report-into-Cambridge-Analytica-invites-regulatory-questions/">quashed</a> those theories on Tuesday. New York Times reporter Nick Confessore laid out the highlights of Denham’s report on Twitter on Wednesday:
“All those things you read about the thousands of data points CA had on American voters? Most of it was commercially available to anyone with the $. Points to larger issues of data &amp; privacy but not something unique to CA,” Confessore said, noting that the ICO found Cambridge Analytica obtained most Facebook data through commercial means.
“[The ICO] didn’t find any new evidence of a connection between CA’s campaign work and Russian interference in 2016,” Confessore continued. “[The ICO} reiterated its earlier finding that Cambridge Analytica did not work on the Brexit campaign beyond some early discussions.”
Critics hounded Confessore, one of the journalists who reported on the debunked allegations surrounding the U.S. election and Brexit, on Twitter for his role in pushing the assertions that others had said for years were overblown or false.
“This is such obvious revisionist bulls**t. The NYT and the rest of the tech journo circle covered the hell out of Cambridge Analytica for YEARS after the election, lending credence to what I and other ad tech insiders decried as overblown, laughable conspiracy theories,” Author and tech entrepreneur Antonio Garcia Martinez said.
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This is such obvious revisionist bullshit. 
The NYT and the rest of the tech journo circle covered the hell out of Cambridge Analytica for YEARS after the election, lending credence to what I and other ad tech insiders decried as overblown, laughable conspiracy theories. <a href="https://t.co/RmGxbaelKe">https://t.co/RmGxbaelKe</a>
&mdash; Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) <a href="https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1313862663735144448?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 7, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Confessore later defended himself and other journalists from the attacks, saying that while some of the biggest bombshells around the Cambridge Analytical story turned out to be duds, the story still deserved scrutiny for its data privacy concerns. He also defended reporters’ positing that Cambridge Analytica used new technology with Russian aid to influence British and U.S. elections, what Confessore called the “secret sauce” of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Confessore said that reporters were reasonably skeptical of the theory throughout their reporting.
“The secret sauce was in question almost from the beginning, not only in stories during the campaign from [Politico] and others, but afterwards, in 2017, from [Ad Age], [BuzzFeed News], and [The New York Times].
H/t <a href="https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/10/08/uk-investigation-cambridge-analytica-finds/">Hot Air</a>

The New York Times

Another Media ‘Bombshell’ On Trump-Russia Turned Out To Be B.S.

Russia

&#8203;Playboy has officially decided to #DeleteFacebook, joining the ranks of a few other high-profile companies to do the same, including Tesla, SpaceX, and WhatsApp. While other corporations are citing concerns about the security of user data for their decision to get off the social media platform, Playboy has a slightly more scandalous rationale.
Since The Guardian published its largely <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28414/cambridge-analytica-and-campaign-destroy-ben-shapiro">overblown</a> &#8220;bombshell&#8221; exposé providing the account of a former Cambridge Analytica employee-turned-whistleblower who detailed what he described as unethically attained and utilized Facebook user data by the firm that eventually partnered for a time with the Trump campaign, Facebook has been under increased pressure over how it handles user data. Though Mark Zuckerberg has pledged his company&#8217;s commitment to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28539/mark-zuckerberg-heres-what-really-happened-james-barrett">clamping down on data mining</a>, the fallout continues, Playboy being the latest to join the #DeleteFacebook movement.
But while Playboy cited its concerns with &#8220;exposing&#8221; its 25 million fans to potential data mining, it also made clear that its years-long battle with the platform over its ability to express its &#8220;values&#8221; is a major factor in its decision to &#8220;leave the platform.&#8221;
&#8220;Facebook&#8217;s content guidelines and corporate policies continue contradicting our values,&#8221; Cooper Hefner announced in a statement posted Wednesday. &#8220;We&#8217;ve tried to craft our voice for the platform, which in our opinion continues to be sexually repressive. Learning of the recent meddling in a free U.S. election further demonstrates another concern we have of how they handle users&#8217; data &#8212; more than 25 million of which are Playboy fans &#8212; making it clear to us we must leave the platform.&#8221;
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We are stepping away from Facebook <a href="https://t.co/4yFIdk2eDE">pic.twitter.com/4yFIdk2eDE</a>
&#8212; Cooper Hefner (@cooperhefner) <a href="https://twitter.com/cooperhefner/status/978855974923591682?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 28, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
Among the &#8220;values&#8221; Playboy is attempting to promote, of course, is nudity, which Facebook bans. Playboy briefly toyed with actually rejecting its own pro-nudity &#8220;value,&#8221; ceasing to publish fully nude images starting in 2015, but in 2017 Hefner reversed course and brought the full nudes back.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28539/mark-zuckerberg-heres-what-really-happened-james-barrett">Mark Zuckerberg: Here&#8217;s What Really Happened With Cambridge Analytica, And How We&#8217;re Responding</a>
H/T <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-28/playboy-latest-to-delete-facebook-amid-data-handling-fallout">Bloomberg</a>

Playboy Explains Why It’s Deleting Facebook

Playboy

Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who claims that the project he led resulted in the company&#8217;s unethical use of Facebook data to help elect Donald Trump, made a series of shocking claims in front of a British parliamentary committee on Monday. Among allegations of &#8220;anti-Islamic&#8221; campaigns and hacking, Wylie said that his predecessor may have been &#8220;poisoned&#8221; after a &#8220;deal went sour.&#8221;
In his testimony, Wylie said that CA&#8217;s elections chief Dan Muresan was found dead in a hotel room in Kenya in 2012 while working with President Uhuru Kenyatta&#8217;s re-election campaign. Wylie said he&#8217;d heard Muresan was murdered.
&#8220;Cambridge Analytica was working with Kenyan politicians, but because in a lot of African countries if a deal goes wrong you pay for it,&#8221; said Wylie, the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5548919/Christopher-Wylie-says-predecessor-killed.html">Daily Mail</a> reports.
&#8220;Dan was my predecessor&#8230;.what I heard was that he was working on some kind of deal of some sort &#8212; I&#8217;m not sure what,&#8221; he said. &#8220;The deal went sour. People suspected he was poisoned in his hotel room. I also heard that the police had got bribed not to enter the hotel room for 24 hours. That is what I was told &#8212; I was not there so I speak to the veracity of it.&#8221;
Muresan was the son of Romania&#8217;s former Agriculture Minister Avram Muresan. Shortly after he died, Romania&#8217;s Foreign Ministry described him as working for a &#8220;telecommunications company&#8221;; his presence in Kenyan territory, the ministry told the Bucharest Herald, had not been registered yet with the Romanian diplomatic mission. &#8220;The same source shows that after the police arrived, the body was taken by an undertaker company for an autopsy,&#8221; the Herald reported.
Among other scandalous claims, Wylie told MPs that the SLC, the parent company of CA, was involved in the 2015 Nigerian election, allegedly distributing compromising material and hacking information from presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari. Wylie described the organization as &#8220;incredibly anti-Islamic,&#8221; producing &#8220;threatening&#8221; messages &#8220;portraying Muslims as violent.&#8221;
Wylie&#8217;s allegations that Cambridge Analytica accessed Facebook data to create a database of millions of user profiles for targeted campaign &#8212; a tactic <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28424/ex-obama-campaign-official-heres-how-we-were-able-james-barrett">used</a> by the Obama campaign in 2012 to much praise from the media &#8212; created a media firestorm. Subsequent reports have indicated that the portrayal of CA&#8217;s role in the Trump campaign was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28455/narrative-fail-cbs-drops-bomb-trump-cambridge-james-barrett">overblown</a> and the company maintains that the data collected under Wylie was not used after Facebook asked them to destroy it.
Related: 
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28424/ex-obama-campaign-official-heres-how-we-were-able-james-barrett">Ex-Obama Campaign Official: Here&#8217;s How We Were Able To Mine So Much Facebook Data</a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28539/mark-zuckerberg-heres-what-really-happened-james-barrett">Mark Zuckerberg: Here&#8217;s What Really Happened With Cambridge Analytica, And How We&#8217;re Responding</a>

Shock Claim: Cambridge Analytica Employee Found Dead After ‘Deal Went Sour’

Donald Trump

Have you ever paid to use a social media service? Does Facebook send you a bill each month, or Twitter demand a credit card for use of its service? When you log into Google, does it force you to pay before searching the web or checking email? Of course not. The reason is that you are the product. You no more pay Facebook for your ability to use its services than a banana pays a store for the right to be put on a shelf for purchase. You may not think of yourself as a product. You may not have a UPC barcode label on you. But you are a valuable commodity being sold by these companies. These companies&#8217; customers are called advertisers, who buy your data profiles and then target you with ads for their goods and services.
Last week, it came to light that people who took a humorous test on Facebook to see which Disney princess they most closely matched were actually being profiled by the test creator. You may have thought the test creator really cared which Disney princess you were, but really they cared about who you are. Facebook allowed the test creator to offer the test and collect psychographic information about you to identify your personality and, from that, extrapolate the issues that motivate you to take actions like voting or buying a new toothbrush.
This is why all the media hysteria about Cambridge Analytica amounts to nothing. Barack Obama mastered the art of Facebook data collection and ad targeting. The left only decided it was bad because Donald Trump did it and won. The media also has a major ax to grind against Facebook because many of them relied on Facebook to grow their traffic. With Facebook&#8217;s algorithm change, traffic is down at most major media websites. They blame Facebook and are using this story to score points against the company.
Like with the Russians supposedly stealing the election, the outrage now at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica has more to do with the left&#8217;s refusal to acknowledge how terrible Hillary Clinton was as a candidate and how terrible Robbie Mook, her campaign manager, was at running campaigns. Lest you forget, the Facebook team made themselves available to Clinton&#8217;s team, but the Clinton team did not take advantage of Facebook&#8217;s offer. Trump did. So, too, did Cambridge Analytica.
Barack Obama used Facebook&#8217;s social data to target voters and those voters&#8217; friends. They could build lists of persuadable voters, identify the issues likely to persuade those voters, and then target advertisements and messages to those voters in order to persuade them. They could even take the online data from Facebook, cross reference it to voter databases and find the offline locations of those people in order to target them with door to door volunteers using the same messages.
Cambridge Analytica did the same thing and you&#8217;d think the world ended. The scandal is not that the company harvested Facebook&#8217;s data. The scandal is that Donald Trump won. Did Cambridge Analytica keep data Facebook asked it to delete? Yes. But that&#8217;s just a distraction from the fact that the company got the data in the first place. They got it in the same way other advertisers get it. They got it the same way Barack Obama got it.
What was left unsaid in 2008 and 2012 when the media and left were celebrating Barack Obama&#8217;s genius use of Facebook &#8212; and what is left unsaid now that Cambridge Analytica did the exact same thing only to be condemned &#8212; is that there is no evidence to prove that harvesting social media data actually helped beyond the margins. Obama won and Trump won not because of their social media data harvesting, but because of their issues and their personalities versus the issues and personalities of their opponents.
Had Donald Trump lost in 2016, this would not be a story. But the left is still trying to find things to blame not named Hillary Clinton and the media is mad about its Facebook referral numbers. Now someone must be sacrificed to the gods of outrage.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COM

ERICKSON: Another Excuse To Avoid Blaming Hillary Clinton

Barack Obama

Google

Hillary Clinton

Charged up after sending &#8220;Crazy Joe&#8221; Biden &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28543/round-two-trump-sends-crazy-joe-biden-crying-all-james-barrett">crying all the way</a>&#8221; to the ground in their hypothetical brawl, President Trump decided to work in some high-level trolling of his critics by way of the much-hyped &#8220;Cambridge Analytica scandal.&#8221; The whole thing, suggested Trump Thursday morning, was yet more evidence of just how much his opponents underestimated his campaign &#8212; and are willing to do a 180 on a narrative if it helps their agenda.
A media firestorm has erupted over <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28414/cambridge-analytica-and-campaign-destroy-ben-shapiro">claims</a> that research firm Cambridge Analytica used the data of tens of millions of Facebook users collected without their knowledge to help the Trump campaign, a claim the firm adamantly denies and has offered Facebook access to its records to prove false. As many have highlighted since the &#8220;bombshell&#8221; story first broke, the Obama campaign was widely praised by the same media outlets now so outraged for <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28424/ex-obama-campaign-official-heres-how-we-were-able-james-barrett">doing much the same thing</a> back in 2012.
On Thursday morning, Trump made clear that he&#8217;s not so concerned about the Cambridge Analytica story; in fact, he pointed to it as yet another example of how his opponents underestimated his campaign and will reverse course on a narrative if it helps their cause.
&#8220;Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary&#8217;s large and highly sophisticated staff. Well, not saying that anymore!&#8221; he wrote.
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Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary&#8217;s large and highly sophisticated staff. Well, not saying that anymore!
&#8212; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/976770619424563200?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 22, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
Amid a flood of stories sounding the alarm over the thus far unproven &#8220;Cambridge Analytica scandal,&#8221; <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28455/narrative-fail-cbs-drops-bomb-trump-cambridge-james-barrett">CBS News</a> threw some cold water on the narrative. It turns out that the Trump campaign didn&#8217;t rely nearly as much on the firm&#8217;s data as many reports were suggesting and it &#8220;never&#8221; used the Facebook data that was allegedly unethically collected:
<blockquote>
The Trump campaign never used the psychographic data at the heart of a whistleblower who once worked to help acquire the data&#8217;s reporting &#8212; principally because it was relatively new and of suspect quality and value. The profiling approach utilized by Cambridge Analytica allowed it to predict the voting likelihoods of individual people based on personality, the firm claimed.
</blockquote>
While the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $5.9 million for its services, CBS reports, it did not rely heavily on its data, phasing it out after the primaries and turning instead to the RNC&#8217;s data, which it determined to be &#8220;vastly more accurate&#8221;:
<blockquote>
The crucial decision was made in late September or early October when Mr. Trump&#8217;s son-in-law Jared Kushner and <a data-invalid-url-rewritten-http href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brad-parscale-trump-2020-campagin-manager-announced-today-2018-02-27/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump&#8217;s digital guru on the 2016 campaign</a>, decided to utilize just the RNC data for the general election and used nothing from that point from Cambridge Analytica or any other data vendor. The Trump campaign had tested the RNC data, and it proved to be vastly more accurate than Cambridge Analytica&#8217;s, and when it was clear the RNC would be a willing partner, Mr. Trump&#8217;s campaign was able to rely solely on the RNC.
</blockquote>
Related:
&#8203;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28455/narrative-fail-cbs-drops-bomb-trump-cambridge-james-barrett">Narrative Fail: CBS Drops Bomb On Trump-Cambridge Analytica Claims</a>
&#8203;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28539/mark-zuckerberg-heres-what-really-happened-james-barrett">Mark Zuckerberg: Here&#8217;s What Really Happened With Cambridge Analytica, And How We&#8217;re Responding</a>

Trump Trolls Critics Over ‘Cambridge Analytica Scandal’

A new report by <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-of-cambridge-analytica-data-before-election/">CBS News</a> poured some cold water on the media firestorm sparked by The Guardian&#8217;s exposé on the Trump-connected Cambridge Analytica firm&#8217;s efforts to gather data on Facebook users. Though the Trump campaign did work with the firm, CBS reports, it quickly &#8220;phased out&#8221; its partnership with the group for the general election and did not use any of the &#8220;psychographic&#8221; data at the center of The Guardian&#8217;s report.
On Sunday, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump">The Guardian</a> published a lengthy investigative piece based on the claims of whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who says he &#8220;made Steve Bannon&#8217;s psychological warfare tool&#8221; for Cambridge Analytica before he left in 2014 but now says he regrets heading up the effort. The firm, Wylie said, unethically accessed Facebook data from some 50 million users to create profiles based on personality type for targeted campaigning. The report set off a series of damning headlines, though many pointed out that efforts to use social media data to create profiles had been widely praised by the same outlets back in 2012 when the Obama campaign likewise <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28424/ex-obama-campaign-official-heres-how-we-were-able-james-barrett">mined social media data for campaigning purposes</a>.
Though The Guardian and Wylie made much of the Facebook data collected by the firm in 2014, and suggested the Trump campaign used it, CBS reports that none of the data obtained under Wylie was actually used:
<blockquote>
The Trump campaign never used the psychographic data at the heart of a whistleblower who once worked to help acquire the data&#8217;s reporting &#8212; principally because it was relatively new and of suspect quality and value. The profiling approach utilized by Cambridge Analytica allowed it to predict the voting likelihoods of individual people based on personality, the firm claimed.
</blockquote>
As for the partnership between the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica, CBS suggests that the campaign&#8217;s reliance on CA&#8217;s data has been overblown by The Guardian and other outlets.
The Trump campaign paid the firm $5.9 million for data collection services and used some of its data through the end of the primaries, but then phased it out, instead using the RNC&#8217;s data, which it determined to be &#8220;vastly more accurate,&#8221; for most of the general election campaigning. The campaign had only contracted with CA as &#8220;a hedge against the RNC, in case it wouldn&#8217;t share its data,&#8221; CBS reports.
<blockquote>
The crucial decision was made in late September or early October when Mr. Trump&#8217;s son-in-law Jared Kushner and <a data-invalid-url-rewritten-http href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brad-parscale-trump-2020-campagin-manager-announced-today-2018-02-27/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump&#8217;s digital guru on the 2016 campaign</a>, decided to utilize just the RNC data for the general election and used nothing from that point from Cambridge Analytica or any other data vendor. The Trump campaign had tested the RNC data, and it proved to be vastly more accurate than Cambridge Analytica&#8217;s, and when it was clear the RNC would be a willing partner, Mr. Trump&#8217;s campaign was able to rely solely on the RNC.
</blockquote>
CBS notes that the campaign used CA&#8217;s data for one large TV ad buy and &#8220;some targeted digital advertising,&#8221; but relied on the RNC&#8217;s data for its main get-out-the-vote campaign. The Trump campaign&#8217;s contract with CA ended on election day, and Parscale says the firm has played no role in the re-election campaign process, which he is heading up.
Media attention on Cambridge Analytica has ratcheted up this week. On Monday, <a href="https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to-entrap-politicians-investigation">Channel </a><a href="https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to-entrap-politicians-investigation">4</a> published a sting video showing key members of the firm discussing shady campaign practices.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/28414/cambridge-analytica-and-campaign-destroy-ben-shapiro">Cambridge Analytica And The Campaign To Destroy Conservatives On Social Media</a>

Narrative Fail: CBS Drops Bomb On Trump-Cambridge Analytica Claims

Obama Administration

On Sunday, The Guardian (UK) ran a much-ballyhooed &#8220;expose&#8221; about the nefarious technological activities of Trump data firm Cambridge Analytica. That firm was owned by the Mercer family, and former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon had a stake as well; Cambridge Analytica&#8217;s original client in the 2016 election cycle was Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). According to The Guardian and its source, one Christopher Wylie, Cambridge used sophisticated data gathering to amass a huge database of information about potential voters &#8212; exactly the same thing the Obama team did in 2012 and was widely praised for doing. But somehow it&#8217;s supremely nefarious when Trump&#8217;s campaign did it in 2016, even if they did nothing illegal.
<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/19/facebook-and-cambridge-analytica-what-we-know-so-far/437392002/">What, exactly, did Cambridge do</a>? They supposedly contracted with Global Science Research to issue a personality quiz; in order for you to take the quiz, you had to give them access to your Facebook profile. They then cross-referenced personality tendencies with politics. First, this isn&#8217;t particularly shocking or particularly sophisticated. Second, Cambridge Analytica claims they didn&#8217;t use data from GSR.
Facebook, upon finding out about this non-illegal, rather common internet activity, promptly suspended Cambridge Analytica. Which makes sense, since this entire scandal is designed to pressure Facebook into cracking down on supposed right-wing activity.
This is part of a broader pattern: Democrats, enraged at Trump&#8217;s election, have targeted social media as the supposed nexus in a corrupt scheme to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency. They tacitly threaten legislative crackdowns. Then those social media companies, which lean left anyway, crack down on right-wingers. Voila! Problem solved. It&#8217;s no coincidence that Democratic officials have spent an inordinate amount of time jabbering about idiotic pro-Trump memes on Facebook, posted by Russians and seen by virtually no one; it&#8217;s no coincidence Democrats keep complaining about &#8220;fake news,&#8221; by which they mean &#8220;news we don&#8217;t agree with.&#8221; The goal isn&#8217;t to stop Russian interference, but to push Facebook to stop allowing non-Democratic-approved content. And Facebook has complied.
This isn&#8217;t a secret. Wired <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/">ran a cover story about the political pressure campaign</a> against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in February. Here&#8217;s what that article has to say about Facebook&#8217;s perspective:
<blockquote>
The stories varied, but most people told the same basic tale: of a company, and a CEO, whose techno-optimism has been crushed as they&#8217;ve learned the myriad ways their platform can be used for ill. Of an election that shocked Facebook, even as its fallout put the company under siege. Of a series of external threats, defensive internal calculations, and false starts that delayed Facebook&#8217;s reckoning with its impact on global affairs and its users&#8217; minds. And&#8212;in the tale&#8217;s final chapters&#8212;of the company&#8217;s earnest attempt to redeem itself.
</blockquote>
This latest story on Cambridge Analytica is just part of a larger attempt to convince social media companies that the best way to fly under the radar is to shut down conservative opinions &#8212; and the Leftists who run Silicon Valley are more than likely to embrace that solution, even as they claim they&#8217;re merely attempting political neutrality. It&#8217;s not a coincidence that Facebook&#8217;s new algorithms have slammed conservative Facebook traffic. It&#8217;s not a coincidence that YouTube seems to demonetize conservative videos. It&#8217;s not a coincidence that Twitter suspends Steven Crowder but recommends that others follow Louis Farrakhan.
We&#8217;re watching the social media crackdown on the Right take place in real time. And if conservatives don&#8217;t find other outlets for distributing their message, the supposedly open platforms that they used to debate, argue, and convince will become political apartheid technology used to quash their opinions.

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