The Democrats have weaponized state AGs and now turnabout is fair play as the Missouri AG Josh Hawley demands that Facebook turn over all of their communications with the Obama administration and his campaigns.
Recently a couple of Obama officials have bragged about their close relationship with Facebook, including one tweet from an Obama official that said a Facebook official told them they were allowed to mine users in order to get valuable information because “We are on the same side.”
Hawley is looking into it as the lamestream press and congressional Democrats are trying to use Cambridge Analytica as a weapon against President Trump. They may live to regret it. Facebook will absolutely hate it. You see, the Trump campaign is not culpable for anything Cambridge Analytica did.
Campaign finance forms filed with the FEC (Federal Election Committee) shows that Trump paid Cambridge Analytica fair market value. Cambridge Analytica could be held accountable, but not Trump.
Obama, on the other hand, is vulnerable because they didn’t pay someone, they mined the information themselves and campaign finance forms show they paid Facebook nothing for the information, making it an illegal In Kind Payment.
Washington Free Beacon reports:
Missouri’s Republican attorney general Josh Hawley delivered an investigative subpoena to Facebook’s Menlo Park offices on Monday, demanding a wide-ranging group of documents related to the social media giant’s handling of user data.
The civil investigative demand, which was provided by the attorney general’s office and can be viewed here, comes a week after a group of 37 state attorneys general sent a letter asking for answers on how user data was shared with third-party groups such as Cambridge Analytica.
Hawley decided to follow-up on the letter with the subpoena to give Facebook a “legal consequence for failing to respond” by May 29, his office said.
The probe aims to determine whether Facebook exercised “appropriate care and protection over private consumer data” and whether the site’s terms and conditions “accurately and adequately explained how consumers’ data would be used.”
Obama campaign manager Jim Messina once bragged about how the 2012 Obama campaign used the information they gleaned from Facebook to reach out for votes.
“FLASHBACK: Obama campaign manager Jim Messina touts 2012 campaign used “targeted sharing” on Facebook to use supporters to persuade undecided friends & family to support Obama.”
FLASHBACK: Obama campaign manager Jim Messina touts 2012 campaign used "targeted sharing" on Facebook to use supporters to persuade undecided friends & family to support Obama. pic.twitter.com/zmGqrx4xrv
— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) March 21, 2018
Messina said:
“We built this thing called targeted sharing … It allowed us to use Facebook to persuade people.”
“We spent a billion dollars to figure out a simple truth: What your friends and family and neighbors say is more important to your consumer decisions and your political decisions than anything else because you’re getting so much data thrown at you.”
“So the final six days of the campaign, six million people logged onto Facebook through BarackObama.com, and they saw a 20-second Michelle Obama video because everyone loves Michelle Obama.”
“And at the end of the 20 seconds, we had matched our data with their data, and we gave them five of their best friends who are undecided voters, and said, ‘Click here to send them a video, click here to send them information.’”
“Of those people, 78 percent of them voted for Barack Obama.”
This is another investigation that won’t turn out well for the Democrats.
It could be even worse for Facebook as Congress will have to eventually regulate Facebook and probably Google.