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Welcome to the World of Pulitzer Prize Winning Political Cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez


Facebook Faceplant 03-24-18
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Mark Zuckerberg and the plunging prospects of Facebook

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PD Editorial: Facebook’s privacy faceplant
  
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD | March 21, 2018, 12:11AM   PRESS DEMOCRAT

It turns out that handing a ton of personal information over to Facebook isn’t a good way to keep it private, especially if you don’t take some simple steps to protect it.

As recently reported, a company called Cambridge Analytica acquired 50 million Facebook users’ personal data. It hoped to transform that data into valuable psychological models for targeting persuasive political messages at people. It sold its services first to Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, then to Donald Trump’s.

This sort of activity isn’t new. President Barrack Obama’s campaign team mined social media data and targeted marketing years ago, just not with such subterfuge.

Facebook vehemently insists that this wasn’t a data breach. That parsing helps Mark Zuckerberg’s company because it didn’t report the incident as required by an earlier federal consent agreement. If it were a data breach, then the company could be in even bigger trouble.

Yet in some ways a data breach might have been preferable, at least for consumers.

A data breach would mean hackers broke in and stole the data. The company, assuming it had taken reasonable security measures, would be a victim, too. If it’s not a breach, it’s something more insidious. Personal data about millions of people wound up in a bad place through mostly legitimate implementation of Facebook’s business model. 

There are some technical caveats to that. A researcher harvested the information when 270,000 Facebook users voluntarily took a survey. They didn’t know the app also collected data about their friends who never consented to participate. Cambridge Analytica was supposed to delete the data after it was caught, but it reportedly did not. And Facebook knew about this for years and didn’t think it was worth telling 50 million people whose data was loose.

The fallout from these revelations probably will play out over years. Facebook’s stock value has taken a nosedive. Cambridge Analytica suspended its CEO. There’s even talk about congressional hearings and new regulations.  read more

Great Show

Our friend Dave Sussman gets the answers:  David Horowitz, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owen and Michelle Balconi on freedom and today's youth - listen to the Whiskey Politics podcast by clicking the player below, or watch the YouTube video
Exposing the hypocrisy of the current Facebook flap

MAR 22, 2018 AT 09:40 AM BY CLERVIN
MURFREESBORO VOICE

I love exposing liberal hypocrisy as well as the collusion between the media and the “never Trump” crowd. Here’s the short version of the hysteria surrounding Facebook and the 2016 Presidential election.

Facebook came under fire over the weekend after press reports that a political intelligence firm with ties to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump had improperly accessed data from the profiles of as many as 50 million Facebook users via a developer. The firm, Cambridge Analytica, has touted its role in helping swing the 2016 election to the President.

Facebook had already faced scrutiny by U.S. lawmakers over the alleged use of the platform by Russia to send inflammatory and fake news postings to users in the United States during the 2016 presidential election in an attempt to inflame and divide voters.

The company's chief security officer is reportedly resigning this year while stock plummeted.Facebook vice president for marketing Carolyn Everson stated, “We are unbelievably outraged and beyond disturbed at the allegations that data was misused or our policies have been violated.”

Being aghast when confronted with the reality that Facebook allows your personal information to be used by the highest bidder is akin to being surprised that gambling goes on in Las Vegas. Egad, who would have thunk it!

As the controversy over Cambridge Analytics’ alleged misuse of Facebook data grows, other groups’ use of the social network has also been thrust into the spotlight, including President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential election campaign.

Back then, Obama was described as a visionary, a genius - who figured out how to tap into Facebook’s ocean of data on users — and their friends — to micro-target messages. Oh, the mystique of the Obama hipsters, so attuned to data, so the trope went.

So where was the outcry when Obama mined Facebook? While the press is falling over itself in search of horrifying adjectives to describe the Facebook “data breach,” calling it the scandal of the century, seem to have forgotten the way they treated President Obama’s use of data on millions of Facebook users to win reelection in 2012.

The fact of the matter is Facebook happily, willingly let the Obama team soak up every user data profile on Facebook. And the Obama team’s out bragging about it.

But now they want us to believe that they’re outraged over what Cambridge Analytica did, 270,000 users versus Facebook’s nearly one billion? Stop and think of that number, by the way. Folks, Facebook’s business model is selling your user data. That is Facebook’s business model.

So, why was this data mining genius one day, then a heinous breach of trust the next? The only possible answer is Donald Trump.
read more

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 Join Michael P. Ramirez, famed classicist  Victor Davis Hanson, former Czech Republic President Václav Klaus, New Criterion's Roger Kimball, Hillsdale President Larry Arnn and many more brilliant speakers aboard the fabulous Hillsdale Hawaiian Cruise July 15-31.  Learn more HERE
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