Behind Cambridge Analytica lay a bigger threat to our democracy: Facebook
Jennifer Cobbe
More needs to be done to clamp down on big tech’s nefarious methods of influencing our politics and culture
Oddly, I don’t think Jenny means bans on articles which show a lefty in a bad light – like, say, buying the VP’s influence through oligarchs hiring his son.
But maybe I’m just being mean.
Yes, for some reason none of this data harvesting etc. was a problem during the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections. Indeed, the winners told everyone just how clever they were……..
This sort of thing (not my capitals BTW, this is how it was written):-
In a 2013 interview, California Rep. Maxine Waters revealed that Obama possessed a “kind of database that no-one has ever seen before,” with “information about everything, on every individual.”
“The President has put in place an ORGANIZATION with the kind of DATABASE that no one has ever seen before in life,” Rep. Maxine Waters told Roland Martin.
“That’s going to be very, very POWERFUL,” Waters said. “That database will have INFORMATION about EVERYTHING ON EVERY INDIVIDUAL on ways that it’s never been done before and whoever runs for President on the DEMOCRATIC ticket has to deal with that. They’re going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can’t get around it. And he’s been very smart. It’s very POWERFUL what he’s leaving in place.”
Mind you Maxine is as dumb as a box of rocks so she might have been referring to a Filofax.
Like Our Host I have been involved in election campaigns on the ground, and we had a never-seen-before database that held information about everybody that existed Pickthat had never been seen before ever…. since the mid-1980s. Electoral Agents Record System, basically, the electoral register with added fields for “contacted” “casework” “likely voting intention”, etc.
LibDems use Connect, Conservatives use BlueChip, Labour use NationBuilder. They’re all just databases, with the raw data imported from (struggles to remember…. ah!) Pickwick Electoral Office Database.