Another Excuse To Avoid Blaming Hillary Clinton

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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’ 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’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’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’s team, but the Clinton team did not take advantage of Facebook’s offer. Trump did. So, too, did Cambridge Analytica.

Barack Obama used Facebook’s social data to target voters and those voters’ 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’d think the world ended. The scandal is not that the company harvested Facebook’s data. The scandal is that Donald Trump won.

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Liberals are not very good at facing reality. They can’t face that Obama was a monumental, historic failure, that a gun doesn’t commit crimes or that Hillary was (is) a despicable person.

Before the election I knew loads of Utah Dems.
But it was not until Hillary lost that any of them admitted staying home instead of voting for her.
One prominent complaint was her shrillness.
‘It was as if she doesn’t hear herself when she is being harsh, shrill, cold,’ one of them told me. (paraphrased)
To me it was amazing that, in all her years in public, Hillary had never benefited from a voice class.

@Nanny G: She seems to have avoided class altogether.