The Democratic National Committee has been attacking all opposition as vaguely Russian since before the party convention they rigged with white noise generators in 2016. Following the embarrassing defeat in the general election of their chosen one, they have sought to control the conversation with tools to eliminate any voice that opposes a very narrow politic they consider correct.
There is a certain joy in a newsroom when an accurate prediction of the future comes to pass. Two days ago the Mockingbird published an examination of secret untested cellphone app that would be used to tally yesterday's Iowa caucus vote.
A few months ago a Facebook advertisement piqued my interest about how the company was leveraging my user data to target ads in my feed. What began as a passing curiosity about how the company targets advertising, turned into a deep dive at big tech's hidden and unregulated practices. The research led me to construct an experiment that exposed not only a deep level of corporate surveillance into our everyday lives, but also a cross-platform and cross-company effort to integrate our personal data, and use it to manipulate user behavior.
Without former Cambridge University professor Alexander Kogan’s desire to obtain Facebook data for his research, Cambridge Analytica would never have had access to the 87 million profiles they used to elect Trump in 2016.
Still reeling rightward from their unexpected electoral college defeat, the Democratic Party leadership still struggles to find some force to blame other than their own candidates, positions and tepid token defense of the status quo. After searching the internet for the worst clickbait ever to call fake news (The fifth thing on their list will amaze you) they first enlisted the tech titans of Menlo Park to aid them in the first phase of their broad censorship initiative.
A very small sector of the media seems concerned about “fake news.” There seems to be little unified definition of it. The center right wing of the Democratic Party has taken up the banner of “fake news” as somehow being responsible for their narrow loss an election with the lowest voter turnout in two decades. A couple of days before Thanksgiving, while most of America was cooking and preparing to shop the Tech Titans of Silicon Valley began to implement their drive for outright censorship with Facebook leading the way.