>it would effectively be utilizing their corporate resources to disproportionately benefit certain candidates at the expense of others
Which is still not illegal.
Fox News does it all the time.
Which is still not illegal.
Fox News does it all the time.
https://ijr.com/ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/
> A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do
https://www.rt.com/usa/421808-obama-facebook-mine-data/
Carol Davidsen, former director for media analytics for Obama’s 2012 campaign, has poured oil onto the fire by reveling in a series of tweets that Facebook allowed them to do “things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do.”
That reportedly included “suck[ing] out the entire social graph” – an individual’s network of friends on Facebook – in a bid to target more and more potential voters through friends’ friends on social media.
...
After Facebook “realized” what the Obama campaign staffers had been doing, they preferred to turn a blind eye for one simple reason: “they were on our side,” Davidsen claimed.
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.
> As the Times put it, the massive exporting of private user data triggered repeated alarms at Facebook due to the volume of profile data going out the door, but that “in each case, the company was satisfied the campaign was not violating its privacy and data standards.” In all, through its data efforts, the campaign ended up with a database of 15 million persuadable voters.
> In short, according to the Times’ reporting, which is borne out by many other reports of the time, the Obama campaign engaged in nearly identical activity to what Cambridge Analytica is claimed to have done: they took a set of users who willingly contributed their data to a cause and quietly mined their friend lists, downloading immense volumes of private material from unwitting individuals that never authorized, let alone had any idea, that a political campaign was harvesting their information from Facebook simply because a person they were connected with had given the organization permission to harvest their information.
https://nypost.com/2018/03/20/obamas-former-media-director-s...
> Obama’s former media director: Facebook was once ‘on our side’
> A former media director for the Obama campaign said Facebook allowed them to access the personal data of its users in 2011 because the social media giant was “on our side.”
> “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, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, wrote Sunday on Twitter.
> Davidsen said she and her team were able to gather massive amounts of personal information from Facebook users, as well as their friends.
Here’s Carol Davidsen’s Twitter account where this entire story comes from
https://mobile.twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997
Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975?s=20
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.
Seems like it might be better to use critical thinking of work off original sources rather than trusting any media organization to do that for you.
Just curious do you bring that up in every time someone quotes them as well?
TBH though, RT has a bunch of Russian-angle propaganda in some of its shows. Those are mostly the shows hosted by actual Russians, or with Russian/living-in-Russia panelists; and their newscasts. Other shows, particularly those by non-Russian journalists/creators, aren't like that. Of course, it is a Russian state entity which selects which people and shows get to be on the network. It seems to me like the main influence on the non-Russian shows is that they refrain from covering or referring to internal Russian affairs and politics.
But it feels so very slimy. Also, such events seem to happen with alarming frequency. (I'm thinking of people's gmail accounts that disappear when their posts go viral, then get quickly restored.) What if electric utilities were like, "oops!" then claim an "algorithm" shut off the power to your campaign HQ. What if internet providers were doing things like that. In those cases, people could switch providers. In the case of online ads, I'm not sure that's a viable option for a campaign and many others.
There are contracts you can breach and just provide a refund, and no one is worse off. But that's not always the case, and any material failure to not perform under the contract is a breach.
And it is the norm that return of consideration is the limit to damages for breach of contract; the exceptional circumstances permitting additional recovery almost all involve you having—both in fact and in the other parties knowledge (and, IIRC, generally requires this to be expressly part of the body of agreement in the contract)—relied on the promise in the contract to forego some other opportunity that is lost in the breach.
What contract law are you reading? The standard damages for breach of contract are called compensatory damages... meaning they put you in the same place you were in had the contract not been breached.
Suppose you sign a contract to buy $1000 of widgets, but the seller never sends the widgets, and instead you have to go out and buy the widgets from someone else for $2000. You have a pretty clear breach of contract claim for the extra $1000 you needed to pay someone else.
Besides, if they are so eager to make algorithms decide things like this only to be fixed later by a human, they should at least set better thresholds or include some heuristics to find correlations that might legitimize the increase in spending or clickthrough.
Google users have reasonable expectations for monetization, and the shockingly arbitrary & rapid demonetization without notice nor recourse, usually during a narrow window of opportunity, certainly is actionable.
Would be easy for Google to simply withhold payment subject to review, rather than deny payment altogether for the contended period.
FB and G are natural monopolies, while Fox News is a branded commodities dealer.
I think it most of europe it is illegal. Not so in the US ?
Now, it's true that (especially natural) monopoly status is often a justification for laws imposing common carrier rules, but such laws have not been adopted which apply to Google in the activity in question , whether or not such would be a desirable policy, so their alleged monopoly status isn't indirectly relevant that way, either.
The monopoly status has weight in such cases, as it can be construed as illegal electioneering, given Google's control over speech discovery on the internet.
Yes, but monopoly status is irrelevant to that. It's as illegal from a non-monopoly as a monopoly and an act which legally isn't an in-kind contribution by a non-monopoly isn't transformed into one when done by a monopoly.
And policies which are not targeted for or against a particular candidate that happen to affect a candidate differently are not, even presumptively, in-kind contributions under the law—there is no “disparate impact” rule for political content as there is for, e.g., racial discrimination in employment.
There are rules against circumventing campaign contribution laws. Intentional suppression (as alleged) of Tulsi's speech, or that of any other candidate, is equivalent to donations to her opponents of millions of dollars, given Google's scale, without following FEC rules on the same.
Yes.
> Intentional suppression (as alleged)
Sure, the allegation is of something illegal
There is pretty much zero evidence presented that favors the conclusion alleged over a policy that is not illegally specifically targeted but happens to adversely impact the candidate.
But the allegation is itself a way of getting a not insignificant quantity of free media, which is a sufficient reason for a candidate that is polling at <1% in most Democratic primary polls at not above 2% in the most favorable, and who has raised close to an order of magnitude less money than the top tier Democratic candidates, to make it. The fact is, Gabbard’s never been anything but a third-tier candidate and no one would have any reason to lift a finger to suppress her campaign because it was never going anywhere.
Political activity by companies is regulated. A petroleum company cannot offer in-kind donations of "unlimited" gas to a candidate, without flouting FEC campaign contribution and electioneering laws. Likewise, Google cannot artificially prop-up, or suppress a candidate without breaking FEC regulations
The FEC has no mandate to regulate monopolies, but when a monopoly with the power to manipulate elections violates electioneering laws, it automatically becomes the most egregious offender, and the focus of any logic based decision making at the FEC.
Obviously, these are still allegations, but Tulsi has won many elections over 15 years, and her campaign is likely seasoned in managing Google advertising accounts. Which is why her allegations seem believable, given her overt criticism of Google, and Google employees' support of other candidates
They can be as specific as they want, but it's immaterial as to whether a law was broken. It may be material, if a law was broken, to the argument for particular degree of damages, and it's certainly key to Gabbard’s ploy for free media independent of any legal relevance it has.