Did I Elect Donald Trump?
Message from Mark
I got the email from Mark Zuckerberg in my inbox. It read:
“Charles, we understand the importance of keeping your data safe. We have banned the app “This Is Your Digital Life,” which one of your friends used Facebook to log into. We did this because the app may have misused some of your Facebook information by sharing it with a company called Cambridge Analytica. In most cases, the information was limited to public profile, Page likes, birthday, and current city.”
What?
I hesitated and read the email a second time. It said the same thing but its meaning was sinking in now. My Facebook page, which I use to communicate my thoughts and feelings to my friends, had been robbed. That was how it felt. It had been robbed, compromised, violated. I love my Facebook page. But it wasn’t mine anymore. Someone had taken my private parts. My world had changed.
How could this happen? One of my friends? Why would a friend of mine do this to me? Did they know what they were doing? I use Facebook to communicate and share, to work out my ideas and express my feelings. Should I still do that now? Is FB over?
I looked a little further. It appears that a man named Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychology professor, had built an app called “thisisyourdigitallife.” It was one of those seemingly innocuous ways to waste a little more time by taking one of those personality quizzed. The quiz is a list of statements like “I get upset easily” and "I don't talk a lot" and then the AI Bot gives you five measurements as to how accurate this statement is for you.
“very inaccurate”
“moderately inaccurate”
“neither inaccurate nor accurate”
"moderately accurate" or
"very accurate."
It’s a kind of standard social science research method and it’s said to tell a lot about what kind of personality you have. Then, they apply a load of artificial intelligence to your data and presto! They’ve got you cold.
People were paid to take this, not a lot, between $1 and $2, and the reports say 270,000 FaceBook users took the quiz. That's a lot of people looking to do something for chump change but that's the gig economy that the industrialist Silicon Valley men have built.
However, the reports further state that 50 million Facebook clients had their pages “scraped.” So how did 270,000 turn into 50 million? #thisisyourdigitallife wormed its way through my Facebook friend who downloaded it into all my friends' friends pages and took their info, too. Wonderful. Now, due to some friend, my Facebook page has been scraped. That’s what they call it, “scraped.”
Then I read that those 50 million profiles represented nearly a quarter of potential US voters. Holy cow! These people are not messing around!
Newspaper accounts said that Professor Kogan then sold the information to a company called Cambridge Analytica.
Upon further inspection, it doesn’t seem to have worked that way. Actually, Cambridge Analytica, like many other data providers, hire people like Professor Kogan to build apps that will give them the data they want so they can build what they call “psychographic profiles” about all 50 million of us and sell that to political campaigns. Facebook was set up to allow data brokers access to our personal information. All this for a fee. That’s how Facebook makes its money. Facebook is a scam.
I knew it.
What a data broker does is simple. It takes all the personal data it finds on someone’s Facebook page and figures out how that person thinks, what is important to them, and especially, what makes them angry. They are tracking my hates by inverting my likes. Anger is important here because anger is what motivates a person to take action, to click on “like” for a page they agree with, to click on a link for more information, to vote. The fastest way to get someone to vote is to get them angry. That’s why data providers like Cambridge Analytica rape Facebook users. Nothing gives them the insight into a person’s feelings of anger like your Facebook data and mine. There’s no other website that can do that. Facebook is an evil genius.
I then checked out Cambridge Analytica’s website. It states “We find your voters and move them to action.” There is this Cambridge Analytica whistleblower named Christopher Wylie who said: "We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of profiles. And built models to exploit that and target their inner demons."
And then I read that Cambridge Analytica was hired by the Trump campaign. Fuck. My data helped Donald Trump get elected??!!! Double fuck. Obviously, I didn’t vote for Trump, I voted for Hillary, even with all her faults. I wouldn't vote for Trump if you held a gun to my head. I'd rather take the bullet than the ballot. But now, it turns out that I helped Trump win! I’m gonna have to move out of New York City.
Hey, you know something? That anger stuff works. I am really, really angry. If Cambridge Analytica can scrape my friends’ friends, then they can take anything they want anywhere. This is robbery. That data is mine and they can’t have it. I’m going to get to the bottom of this.
OK, here we go. I’m going to find out what information Facebook has on me so I Google “what information does Facebook have on me.” Everything starts with Google in my world. This turns out to be easy. You go to Facebook and click on “settings” and follow some prompts and they send you an email when your data is ready to be downloaded. So far so good. Maybe this is simple.
Or maybe it’s not. Like Snapchat photos of your private parts, once the data is downloaded, they own it.
My Facebook info gets downloaded and I find this list of folders, a lot of them, 24 by count. Lemme see. “Ads, apps, calls and messages, comments.” This looks pretty straight forward. I open “ads.” DOWNLOAD MINE AS A PDF HERE (its only 1288 pages. Please do not print.) There are sub-folders and I click on “Advertisers Who Uploaded Your Information.” These are companies who took my stuff, hundreds of them,
Cardi B, Global Yogis, Help Puppies, Tinder, The Vegan Society, World of Backpacks, Candy Crush Saga, Our Gang, Tiffany & Co., Jesse James, Uber, 50 Cent. 50 Cent? The guy who got shot 9 times? You think I’m interested in 50 Cent, get outta here. Tinder? No thanks, I’m your basic swipe left type. World of Backpacks? I’m no yuppie. Tiffany & Co., I wish. Help Puppies? OK, they’ve got me there. I’ve watched every puppy and kitty video on the internet. But the rest of this stuff? Garbage.
It’s fine when they help me buy the right Big&Tall dress shirts I like but the altRight? #sad
Next folder in the list. Comments. OMG, every crappy comment I ever posted on somebody else’s post, things like “awesome” and “adorable” and “I miss you”, a laundry list of dumb.
Next. Likes and reactions. Holy spit, a list of every single page I’ve ever clicked the “like” button on, such as
“Apr 30, 2018 4:00pm, Toni Hart likes Owl Lovers Page.”
Millions of these. Millions. I like pages of actors, agents, producers and filmmakers because they need LIKES to raise money for their business - not particularly because I actually LIKE/HATE them.
Next. Posts. No! Every post I ever wrote.
Really stupid stuff like “TopFive Thing Overheard at Steve Jobs’ Funeral "Please turn on your iPads and launch the iHymn app..." and Nov 04, 2015 2:10pm, Scott Kelly says “goodnight” with this shot from the International Space Station and tells us “the sun will come out 16 times tomorrow” and Oct 07, 2011 1:59pm, Toni Hart updated her status. “There is no joy in Mudville. The mighty Yankess have struck out. Will someone please remind me - why do we pay these guys so much money?” Total nostalgia. I could spend a week reading this stuff.
Next. Other People's Posts To Your Timeline. Oh, this one is painful. It’s thousands and thousands of things people posted to me, posts from people who are now dead, posts from ex-boyfriends I wish were dead, posts to me in emergencies, checking on me to see if I’m OK, posts like “Dec 06, 2012 9:27am, Terri Gordan wrote on your timeline. “Good to get in touch wıth you - and I don't look that great just now - hair growing back post brain surgery.”
Now wait a minute. Are you telling me that somebody actually paid for this stuff on my Facebook page? Somebody paid to find out that I think
Charles Kirby’s new dog is “awesome” and 50 Cents uploaded my info and Terri had brain surgery?
Stop it! Why would anybody want this junk? It’s junk. I could call it “How I threw my life away.” And somebody wants it a lot. A whole lot. It’s a dogfight for eyeballs. And that makes money how? Oh, right. Ads.
That’s what this is all about. Ads.
So how do they turn my Facebook junk into ads? It’s called “targeting.” The more they know about me, the more they zero in on me as a target. I think I’ll just go paint a red circle on my back.
I looked it up on Techcrunch. Google is the world’s biggest ad company and Facebook comes in second. Facebook brought in $12.78 billion from advertisements in the last quarter of 2017. That’s 98.5 percent of the money Facebook made.
But it turns out that Facebook doesn’t use just the stuff you tell them. Facebook has access to your microphone and your webcam. They have facial recognition software. They use Javascript to track the websites you visit. You share your location with friends and Facebook records it. They know what you buy when you’re not online because Facebook matches the credit card number you gave them for Messenger with your list of offline credit card purchases, which it buys from data brokers. They buy huge amounts of information from these brokers, information from Departments of Motor Vehicle and bankruptcy courts, criminal records, voting records, public healthcare records, property records, estimated annual income, who you’re married to and how she or he spends money, what credit cards you use, what car you drive, what house of worship you attend, what race you are, what neighborhood you live in, how many kids you have, what kind of dog you have and what that dog’s name is. And finally, they know all your insecurities, how far are you in debt, are you going bald, are you on a diet, are you using anti-aging face creams, are you on drugs, are you on hookup websites, what kind of porn do you watch, what kind of ammo do you buy, what are your deepest fears and how can they sell you something to make you feel better.
Facebook knows more about us than we do. And it sells to absolutely anyone. After he takes the $$$, Mark apologizes for selling to a company like Cambridge Analytica and then disowns his company from the way the data was used and pays no reparations.
And Cambridge Analytica takes all that data and gives us a personality test and it crosses the Facebook data with their test and mixes it with some algorithms and figures out who we’ll vote for. It’s easy.
I really did help elect Donald Trump.