Editorials | Investor's Business Daily
Elections: Facebook now faces myriad legal actions for its apparent
misuse of private data on its members.
But one possible legal problem that
isn't getting any attention involves whether Facebook (FB) made, and the Obama campaign accepted,
illegal "in-kind" contributions to Obama's 2012 re-election effort.
As we noted earlier, the Obama
campaign's use of Facebook data dwarfed anything Trump did.
Cambridge Analytica
purchased data from an academic, who gathered it in 2014 through an app that
said the data would only be used for academic purposes. There's no question
that was misleading.
But by the time the general election
rolled around, the Trump campaign had dumped Cambridge as a consultant, which
means the data Cambridge bought had no impact on the general election.
In contrast, the Obama campaign's use of Facebook was massive, and even more
intrusive.
About a million people let the campaign gather not only
data on themselves, but on all their friends, who didn't know their data was
being harvested as well — a number that could easily have reached 190 million,
which, at the time, was about equal to every active Facebook user in the U.S.
Obama's tech gurus were able to
match this rich treasure trove of personal data — likes, dislikes, photos, etc.
— with other databases, creating the largest and most detailed profiles on
voters ever assembled.
And the campaign aggressively used
its unique access to influence millions of people the campaign identified as
"persuadable," sending them highly targeted campaign messages that
appeared to come from their Facebook friends, rather than the Obama campaign.
Obama's people saw this as a massive
advantage, telling the press after the election that it was "the most
groundbreaking piece of technology developed for the campaign."
The press,
in turn, heralded Obama for his brilliance at leveraging social media to
activate voters and win an election at a time when its approval ratings were
low and the economy was doing poorly.
Apparently, Facebook knew its user
data was being harvested en masse, but didn't care.
After the Cambridge Analytica story
broke, an Obama campaign staffer, Carol Davidsen, tweeted about how
"Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph,
but they didn't stop us once they realized what we were doing." By "whole
social graph," she presumably meant profiles of every Facebook user in the
U.S.
She went on to tell the Washington
Post that "We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and
also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We
scraped it all."
She also said that Facebook
officials came to the campaign offices after the election recruiting Obama's
tech team, and that "they 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."
This wasn't entirely new news, by
the way. The New York Times reported in 2013, in another
glowing piece on Obama's tech team, how "The campaign's exhaustive use of
Facebook triggered the site's internal safeguards."
Facebook's response,
according to one campaign official: "They'd sigh and say, 'You can do this
as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.'"
That's where the potential legal
trouble starts.
Despite all the hosannas for Obama's technical prowess, the
arrangement between the campaign and Facebook might have been outside the law.
According to Heritage Foundation election expert Hans von Spakovsky,
federal law "bans corporations from making 'direct or indirect'
contributions to federal candidates."
That ban, he says, doesn't just
include cash, but anything of value. "In other words, corporations cannot
provide federal candidates with free services of any kind."
He goes on, if "Facebook gave
the Obama campaign free access to this type of data when it normally does not
do so for other entities — or usually charges for such
access — then Facebook would appear to have violated the federal ban
on in-kind contributions by a corporation. And the Obama campaign may have
violated the law by accepting such a corporate contribution."
To be sure, von Spakovsky isn't
saying that Facebook or Obama did break the law, only that, given what
Davidsen has now admitted (and so far as we know, no one from Facebook has
disputed her claims), the Federal Election Commission, if not the Justice Dept., should
investigate.
"Carol Davidsen's admissions
should provide a sufficient basis for opening a federal investigation of what
may have been a serious violation of the law," he concludes.
We agree.
And if the mainstream
press weren't so pro-Obama and anti-Trump, you'd be hearing a lot more people
besides von Spakovsky calling for such an investigation.
