Facebook and the Trump Campaign

I recently wrote a blog about leaving Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but after reading a CNN article titled, Here's how to delete Facebook (It won't help), I have a couple of comments to share about why I disagree with this article.

SOME HISTORY

Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm owned by: Alexander Nix (CEO), Robert Mercer,  Rebekah Mercer, AND Steve Bannon,  used data mining techniques in an effort to meddle with the 2016 electoral process. PLEASE NOTE THAT STEVE BANNON IS A KEY PLAYER HERE.

Bannon was Trump's Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President.

Cambridge Analytica started in 2013 as an offshoot of the SCL Group, partly owned by Alexander Nix. Directly from the SCL website:

"SCL Group provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations worldwide. For over 25 years, we have conducted behavioral change programs in over 60 countries & have been formally recognized for our work in defense & social change."

From Wikipedia: Laurence Levy, a lawyer with the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, advises Rebekah Mercer, Steve Bannon, and Alexander Nix on the legality of their company.

Giuliani was Trump's supporter while he was campaigning and he is currently the president's advisor and lawyer.

What a web! Steve Bannon was part owner of Cambridge Analytica and Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, was aware of the inner workings of the SCL Group.



Cambridge Analytica would harvest the "likes" from Facebook, merge that data with other web-accessible data, and create profiles for people. They would target ads based on your likes and profile information. Thousands of fake pages were created targeting specific groups in an effort to sway people to vote for Trump or keep them away from the polls.

So, Facebook users were clearly exploited and eventually this helped Trump get elected.

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE USER DATA

To me it is obvious that Facebook was selling my private data. I had created three pages: one for a software business I own, one for teaching coding to teachers, and one for sharing cooking recipes. They had access to my phone number, address, county, state, etc.

During the summer of 2018 and after I had deleted my Facebook account, I wanted to sell lots of miscellaneous stuff that I owned. I created a new Facebook account, joined several local pages and started selling my stuff there. Because I didn't have any Facebook friends, Facebook started to suggest friends to me. Initially I didn't pay any attention to that, but later on I realized that most of those suggested people were clearly hard core pornograpy accounts. I thought by letting Facebook know about these accounts I would be doing a service to the user community and Facebook. WRONG! After reporting several accounts that clearly were breaking Facebook's rules, in all cases Facebook notified me that they will not take any action because these user accounts did not break any rules! I started to look into these accounts and realized that there were thousands upon thousands of them. Each account had thousands of "friends" that they too were of pornographic nature. I was shocked! The only reason that Facebook would want those accounts is to boost their footprint and show that they have billions of users. I think that if Facebook deletes these accounts it would reduce their user base by half.

You are really looking for trouble if you have installed the Facebook app on your cell phone. Facebook has access to everything there is on your telephone: contacts, telephone numbers, emails, your location, who you called, text messages and more. There are always bugs that save them. When they are caught stealing information that they should not have access to, you know, they play the "that was a bug" game.

Before deleting my real Facebook account, I would receive on a daily basis about five fake spam telephone calls. They would try to sell to me things like: insurance, trips, security devices, loans, you name it. Now, six months without Facebook I receive 2-3 calls per month! Wow!

And to paraphrase a portion of Dr. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech: Free of Facebook, Free of Facebook. Thank God Almighty, I'm Free of Facebook!

DELETE YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT. WAKE UP!!!!!