Maxine Waters: Facebook Handed Obama Data On 200 Million Citizens

March 23rd, 2018

Awake Goy

Maxine Waters boasts that Obama illegally took the data of 200 million citizens from Facebook during 2012 election campaign

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters (CA) has boasted that Barack Obama managed to extract data on 200 million American citizens from Facebook, helping him win the 2012 election.

During an interview on Roland Martin’s “Washington Watch”, Waters admitted that Obama had “information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before” after he convinced Facebook executives to illegally hand over user data:

“Well, you know, I don’t know. And I think some people are missing something here. The president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That’s going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before.”

Daily Wire reports: When conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh highlighted the clip on Monday, he noted that we mysteriously never heard Waters bring that glorious database up again and underscored the similarities with what Obama had done back in 2012 with what Cambridge Analytica is accused of doing in 2014.

Guardian’s exposé on the firm, which was published Sunday, suggests that data obtained from an analytics group on 50 million Facebook users’ profiles was used for targeted campaigning by the Trump campaign two years later. Cambridge Analytics denies the claim, maintaining that they did not use the data once Facebook complained that it was accessed in violation of its rules because the person who conducted the data mining initially claimed it was only for educational purposes.

In a series of tweets on Sunday, Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, explained how the campaign was able to mine Facebook’s data in a way that employees for the company suggested they “wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”

“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,” she wrote. “They came to [the] 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.”

“I worked on all of the data integration projects at OFA. This was the only one that felt creepy, even though we played by the rules, and didn’t do anything I felt was ugly, with the data,” she added later. She also noted that she is “100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side.”

Below is the first tweet in the series, in which she highlights a Time article praising the Obama campaign’s data mining efforts: