Developing: Facebook May Have Broken Federal Law to Help Democrats
With Facebook already mired in controversy over its privacy practices, a new allegation is being made that the social media giant’s actions in the 2012 presidential election violated federal law.
Writing on The Daily Signal, Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative, said Facebook’s efforts to support President Barack Obama “may constitute a major violation of federal campaign finance law as an illegal corporate campaign contribution.”
Obama defeated Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.
Von Spakovsky based his claim on comments made by Carol Davidsen, former media director for Obama for America.
“(Facebook representatives) came to office in the days following election recruiting & 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,” Davidsen tweeted recently.
She said that when Facebook executives saw what the campaign was doing with data they were able to access, “they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.”
They came to office in the days following election recruiting & 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.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
I worked on all of the data integration projects at OFA. This was the only one that felt creepy, even though we played by the rules, and didn’t do anything I felt was ugly, with the data.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
The U.K. Daily Mail reported that the Obama campaign was so adept at its data mining that it was able to obtain information on 15 million Facebook users.
In fact, according to a 2013 report in The New York Times, “The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards.”
It's important to recognize there are differences between how Obama and Cambridge Analytics purported to use mass data from FB. But FB's response to discovering data harvesting in 2012 (which was technically against their terms) was still ¯_(ツ)_/¯
https://t.co/XDheLuntpa pic.twitter.com/ARLJbG17oz— Dan Nguyen (@dancow) March 20, 2018
Also *ahem*. A good number of us had been objecting and pointing out the broader harms of the interaction between Facebook's business model and politics even when it appeared to benefit Obama/Democrats. pic.twitter.com/SVk4Iw86uG
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) March 17, 2018
“The Obama campaign had no need for a third party organization like Cambridge Analytica to collect their data, either. Facebook itself worked with the campaign to help it gather information about users,” radio host Dan O’Donnell posted on WISN.
Unlike Facebook’s leak of information to Cambridge Analytica, von Spakovsky said the issue here is not just privacy, but violation of campaign laws.
The basis for that argument runs like this: Facebook would have charged anyone else for the services that the Obama campaign received for nothing. That would make Facebook’s actions what are known as in-kind contributions. Federal election law bans corporations from making those kinds of contributions.
With Facebook’s actions to help out Obama having been revealed, von Spakovsky wrote, it is time that the federal government open up an investigation.
“Although the statute of limitations may have already run out on this conduct by the Obama campaign, one thing seems certain: Davidsen’s admissions should provide a sufficient basis for opening a federal investigation of what may have been a serious violation of the law by the Obama campaign,” he wrote.
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