The Facebook strategy was rather simple.

[kentuck]

If you start with only ten names of known supporters of a candidate and each of them has fifty "Friends", it is easy to see which of those "Friends" have similar political views.

When each of those fifty "Friends" have fifty "Friends" of their own, we can see how the numbers can add up quickly in an exponential way.

It has been reported that Cambridge Analytical had the names of more than 250,000 people on Facebook. They were able to propagate information to 50 million people with this simple technique. The Friends of the Friends of the Friends added up quickly to a clever political scheme.

Unfortunately, CA and the Trump campaign were able to use this information in such a way as to direct information to specific voters in specific parts of the country, with the help of Facebook executives. Whether aware of the scheme or not, they are responsible for letting these people into their data bases.

[Delmette2.0]

1. And there is the illegal information.

All the friends who didn't give their permission.

[kentuck]

2. Absolutely!

The matter should be litigated, imo.

[TheDebbieDee]

3. Didn't FB also embed 3 staffers with the

Trump campaign as well?

Mark Z allowed his data to be used to slander one candidate over the other...

[kentuck]

4. That is my understanding.

From what I have read.

[MineralMan]

5. Also simplistic.

Facebook's business model of selling access to user information lends itself to misuse. Apparently, such misuse was not well-considered, and safeguards against malicious use were not in place.

A strong case could probably be made that negligence was involved and that the owners of Facebook should have known that their model could be used for nefarious reasons. Perhaps they did know, and simply shrugged that off for the potential profits involved. That would be my guess.

I think litigation will happen in that regard.

There is a pyramid scheme scenario in that business model, certainly, as well.

One wonders what app-makers like Candy Crush are doing with all the data they have collected...

[kentuck]

6. Sometimes "simple" explanations are the best.

Thanks!

I agree with your observations.

[MineralMan]

7. I agree. I've always wondered about

the Facebook data collection thing. It's certainly a marketable concept in these days of big data and data mining.

Zuckerberg is reasonably smart, but maybe not quite smart enough to conceive of the problem. I don't know him, though, so I can't say what he knew and knows. There are plenty of bright fools out there.

[kentuck]

8. I tend to think he was not aware of the potential problems within his platform.

Because, when he began Facebook, it was not intended to be used for political purposes. It evolved into that and those with nefarious ideas used him to reach their political goals.

It was not born evil.

[MineralMan]

9. That could well be the case.

The platform certainly has grown beyond its original concept, for sure.

These days, he may not even understand it that well any longer.

[EricMaundry]

10. My Facebook act is under a fake name and I have few friends.

The only "friends" I have are sites I cannot read any other way.

Outside of that Facebook is a vast useless wasteland.

[Atman]

11. I've run a couple of FB ads. The level of micro-targeting available is truly amazing.

You pick the demographics you want; age, gender, location, specific interests, etc, etc, etc. It's not difficult to see how CA was able to get away with targeting those specific districts which gave Trump the EC, especially given the number of names they had to work with.