Keep lying mikeN. It’s all you have in this.

As you should have guessed already, the messages are lies and misleading information.
The first message was (emphasis inside is mine)

Cambridge Analytica fully complies with Facebook’s terms of service and ?is currently ?in touch with Facebook ?following its ?recent statement? that it had suspended the company from its platform, in order to resolve this matter as quickly as possible?.

Notice the present tense. They might be attempting to comply now that everyone is watching them, but in the years involved they were blatantly violating those terms of service, repeatedly, and lying to FB about doing so. That is the reason they were suspended.

They spent some time trying to dismiss their former employee Wylie (he’s the guy who has been explaining all the shady things CA was doing), and tried to lay complete blame on an outside company. Neither of those claims is supported by what has come out.

They tried the same thing mikeN did, equating their activities with those of the ’08 and ’12 Obama campaigns. That is, of course, pure bullshit, because of the flagrant misuse of data by CA in both those situations (and other reasons that have been disclosed during investigations. Some people will believe it, but they are the people to whom facts don’t matter.)

One of the most amusing lines of crap was their claim (in their tweets) that they never engaged in producing coercive materials, only in advertising (again, emphasis is mine).

Advertising is not coercive; people are smarter than that 5/8
11:49 AM – 17 Mar 2018

That was immediately followed by

This isn’t a spy movie. We’re a data analytics company doing research & analysis on commercial, public and data sets for clients

Of course, advertising is at its core designed to be coercive — that first comment could be the most blatant lie they’ve told in their defense. (Again, the already patently dishonest folks will eat this shit up.)

The funniest (to me) bit is this: CA’s twitter page has this banner message at the top:

Data-driven behavior change

No, they don’t produce things designed to be coercive, not at all./snark

You really have to wonder just how far down the intellectual/moral rabbit hole people have to be in order to say anything like “CA didn’t do anything wrong and certainly did nothing different than that black guy the nation made a mistake with did.”

New York Times, Vox, Wired, Washington Post, none of these focused on CA’s breaking FB terms of service. All of this show up in the latter half of the story, and instead focus on CA’s harvesting of Facebook data to win the election, except WP focuses on FB’s privacy issues.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambridge-analytica-explained.html

CA is in the news because of the illegality they did once they decided to break FB’s terms of service. We are learning more about the activities each day. Your ignorant (or is it blatant dishonesty behind it) dismissal of their actions, coupled with your “it’s the same thing Obama’s team did” is typical for you. There is nothing to your assertions.

Either

– You don’t understand what happened because you didn’t read the reports
– You “know” that Obama’s team did illegal things because — well, it’s easy to guess why you would think that

Your misrepresentation of FB’s data policies (as well as those of other groups) concerning data is almost understandable, because FB makes finding out details as difficult as they can — which is typical business practice. Still, it would be a breath of fresh air if you would, at least once, study the issues and make an attempt to understand details instead of making your typical statement from ignorance: they’re the same as Obama but he was worse.

With regards to mining Facebook to win elections, they are roughly the same.
Facebook is upset with CA over the policy violations, but it is not why CA is in the news now.

When you hear people saying they did the same thing Obama’s organization did — they are telling you a massive lie.

You mean not just whataboutism, but mendacious and misleading whataboutism? Shocked, I tell you. Who would *do* such a terrible thing?

And why?

When you hear people saying they did the same thing Obama’s organization did — they are telling you a massive lie.

Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election
“If they contacted the campaign website through mobile apps, cellphone numbers and address books were downloaded. Computer “cookies” captured Web browsing and online spending habits.”
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/28/16726913-obama-campaign-gives-database-of-millions-of-supporters-to-new-advocacy-group

Agree. Sort of.
Jeez they are real shitheads but.
Need to have a good hard look at themselves, the dems.
The republicans are total scum. Intellectually bereft. Ethicaly bereft.
Lets not take ones eyes off the bigger picture which is i spose, bereftness.

People who love nukes but aint racist dont impress me at all in the same way
a rapist who aint racist dosnt impress me.
Its not a feather in the dems cap that they aint overtly racist. Its not a platform. Its not special. Its just normal.
Whats not normal is being a nuke lover, and that they certainly are.
And noone ever calls em out hardly.
Fuck the donkeys and the elephants.