Watch The Panic On Zuck’s Face When Senator Asks About Facebook Helping Obama
Please Subscribe: https://goo.gl/J8aMKx
SOURCE : https://goo.gl/ycq8Yg
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was forced to explain himself during two days of testimony in front of Congress. While many of the questions he was asked did little more than prove 80-year-old lawmakers are clueless when it comes to social media, there have been a few moments of brilliance. One of those moments included the look on Zuckerberg’s face when he was confronted about his company helping Barack Obama.
The world’s leading social media company has been struggling to recover ever since it was revealed that information broker Cambridge Analytica had “mined” the personal data of some 87 million people and some of this information was used in the 2016 presidential campaign. The media has tried to tie the scandal to President Donald Trump, alleging that Trump’s campaign was aided by Cambridge Analytica in targeting voters.
What the media doesn’t seem to care so much about, however, is the fact that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign did almost the exact same thing in 2012 and even openly bragged about its “accomplishment.” Actually, what Obama and Facebook did was worse. A former top Obama staffer, Carol Davidsen, revealed that the tech giant allowed the Obama campaign to scoop data and gave them special favors.
This has been quite the inconvenient reality for Zuckerberg, but he has mostly been able to avoid it with the help of a media complicit in trying to destroy Trump. The Facebook founder couldn’t escape the truth when Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who has a business and technology background, questioned him this week, though.
“I’ve read a series of three articles that were published in the MIT technology review back in 2012. And it talks about how proud the Obama campaign was of exploiting data on Facebook,” said the Republican Sen. from North Carolina. “I think you should probably be equally mad when a former campaign director of the Obama campaign proudly tweeted: ‘Facebook was surprised. We were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.’”
Tillis was referring to Davidsen’s statement. In another tweet, she openly suggested that Facebook gave special privileges to her boss because the company agreed with him politically. “They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,” wrote Obama’s former media director.
“When you go back and do your research on Cambridge Analytica, I would personally appreciate it if you would start back from the first high-profile national campaign that exploited Facebook data,” said Tillis.
As Tillis went into detail about how a 2012 Obama app had mined users’ Facebook data to help the Democrats, Mark Zuckerberg seemed visibly uncomfortable — and the cameras caught it all on a split-screen broadcast by C-SPAN. Zuckerberg spent long hours preparing for his testimony with his legal team, and he likely thought he was prepared for anything lawmakers would throw at him. However, his face as he was grilled by Sen. Thom Tillis was the unmistakable mug of a man guilty as sin.
“I also believe that that person who may have looked the other way when the whole social graph was extracted for the Obama campaign, if they are still working for you, they probably should not,” Tillis scolded, according to National Review. “At least there should be a business code of conduct that says that you do not play favorites. You are trying to create a fair place for people to share ideas.”
Although conservatives are characteristically against government regulation, this is a select case where it appears to be absolutely necessary. When you have companies like Facebook and Twitter which are used by millions of people, a level playing field isn’t just expected, it is imperative. We are in a very dangerous spot when a left-leaning company can control the information people are receiving and steal their data in order to influence national elections.