Badd asks a critical question I answered in my book, Donald Trump Explained, a Special Education Perspective of the Forty-fifth President of the United States.
Facebook data in 2016 was not given to the Trump campaign nor the Russians in a provably knowing manner. The campaign simply “lifted” the data, exploiting API access to do so.
In that breach, a Russian American “researcher” working for Stephen Bannon’s company funded by the Mercers, Cambridge Analytica, scraped roughly 87 million users data via an exploitative quiz Ap, ThisIsMyDigitalLife that harvested users information as well as their friend’s information. It was illegal for the company to sell that stuff, but the company owner is an unethical thug, so it was sold anyway.
That data set wound up in Russia accessed shortly after oligarch-indebted Paul Manafort had given Trump campaign’s internal data to Russian spy Kilimnik. That suggests the Facebook data was included in the hand off.
Trump’s campaign literally spied on US Citizens on behalf of a foreign adversary, yet the scandal, like most Trump-created ones, was projected exclusively onto Facebook by the press.
So what was Facebook to do when Trump/Russia made similar demands on the Company during the midterms?
Zuckerberg gave Trump stuff for free.
And of course, Russia got to pull user data via the same exploit, this time directly with permission, though US accounts were said to have significantly less exposure this time, then when the Trump campaign spied on all of us.
Excellent, Steven
Why do many people around me think so differently about what's going on in our government than me? The difference is I've never been on facebook. Those that see our government like me do not participate in facebook. The people that encouraged me to join facebook, many who were democratic working class have now be come fascist leaning strangers. Thanks for beginning to address this. How can we get our friends and relatives back?