Facebook Has Dozens of Ex-Obama and Ex-Hillary Staffers in Senior Positions
SOURCE : https://goo.gl/cfYtT9
During his recent apology tour, Mark Zuckerberg notably failed to mention recent revelations about the Obama 2012 campaign’s exploitation of the platform’s weak pre-2014 data protections to harvest masses of data from non-consenting users. The number of ex-Obama staffers on his payroll, according to Linkedin, might explain why.
The establishment media narrative on the Facebook data scandal hit a snag last month. They hoped the story would be restricted to Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that they linked to the Cruz and Trump campaigns, and their alleged misuse of data. But a bigger story soon emerged, linked to a longtime media favorite: Barack Obama.
By the admission of Barack Obama’s former media analytics director, Carol Davidsen, the former president hoovered up far more data without users’ consent in 2012, when Facebook’s data policies were (as Facebook now concedes) far more vulnerable to exploitation than they were in 2016.
Mark Zuckerberg admits that, prior to its strengthening of user protections in 2014, Facebook made a critical error in allowing third-party apps to harvest data not just from users who gave them consent, but from their non-consenting friends. What he didn’t mention was the digital campaigning tools developed by Obama for America were among the apps that took advantage of this loophole.
In the words of Carol Davidsen, who oversaw data analytics at Obama for America in 2012, the campaign was “actually able to ingest the entire social network of the U.S.” Davidsen made these comments publicly as early as 2015, but they received little attention at the time.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica story, Davidsen made another bombshell admission on social media — that Facebook representatives visited the Obama campaign offices after the 2012 election and told them they were allowed to get away with it because “they were on their side.”
In retrospect, this shouldn’t be surprising. Obama’s 2012 campaign staff and his subsequent White House team included several former employees of top Silicon Valley companies. After working for Obama, many of these employees returned to Facebook, some of whom now occupy senior positions at the company, according to their Linkedin profiles. They include:
David Recordon, former Director of IT for Obama’s White House. Recordon was Engineering Director at Facebook prior to his role at the White House, and returned to the position after the 2016 election. He is currently Engineering Director for the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative.
David Ploufe, President, Policy and Advocacy for the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. Campaign Manager for Obama in 2008, and still sits on the board of the Obama Foundation.
Josh W. Higgins, currently Executive Creative Director at Facebook. Formerly