Found a new bauble?
Sadly, I don't think you're right about that.
The difference was 70k votes in 3 states. I don't think the argument that "targeted ads don't influence people" is very compelling. Facebook exists and has a market cap of 500 billion because of its sophisticated ad targeting and reach. CA stole the data and used it to swing votes. There's no way of knowing how influential they were, but its not realistic to pretend ads have no influence.
They didn't steal it. Facebook allowed them to get it. After the fact Facebook changed their TOS , but the genie was already out of the bottle. People allow too much of their information to be collected with social network sites
Facebook sold data to anyone willing to pay. Then tried to claim they didn't.
It's funny how y'all focus on this but don't mention the dirty tricks played by the Clinton campaign. A guy she hired to do things like start fights with minorities at Trump rallies was a known Democrat operative for decades. He screwed up telling an undercover guy what kind of tricks they pulled to make the people backing Trump look bad. Clinton had to fire him then. And of course there was the Steele dossier. So both were guilty of using any means necessary to influence the election. But it still comes down to people surveyed in key swing States saying she didn't seem interested in the problems their area was having but he came there and said he'd try very hard to make things better. He threw them a lifeline, she ignored them. And these were decades long Democrat union voters. Highly doubtful they were spending a huge amount of time on Facebook. I'd give FOX News more weight than the fairly minimal Facebook ads. It was during the campaign that Clinton stopped speaking to reporters after it came out about the emails and she responded very badly about it at a press conference. And she wasn't exactly inspiring in the debates. Comparing what she spent on ads to what went on Facebook is extremely lopsided in her favor. Just another example of her side grabbing at anything to blame but her for losing. That being said they should do everything possible to stop this kind of stuff. Next time Bolivia might throw a couple hundred grand at Facebook to get in a pro coca candidate now that it's been demonstrated how easy it is to sway millions of voters.
