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Flashback: Obama Campaign Bragged About Ingesting Facebook Data

by Rush Limbaugh - Mar 20,2018

RUSH: I want you to hear a couple sound bites from 2015. There was an event called the Personal Democracy Forum, and a woman named Carol Davidsen spoke. She was a high-ranking Obama campaign official in 2012. She was at Rentrak [Corporation], the Vice President of Political Technology. I want you to just listen to this. She is describing what we talked about yesterday.

When Obama and the Democrats were basically Hoovering every bit of data Facebook had, they were praised! The New York Times… We had a great caller reminded me of this yesterday. In June of 2013, the New York Times praising Obama and his team as a bunch of geniuses for using social media data to their advantage. It was such a wonderful thing, and they were so smart. Listen to her talk about this…

DAVIDSEN: Facebook 2012 Election had the ability for people to opt in. The Obama campaign, like, rocked this, right? We got people to opt in. And the privacy policies at that time on Facebook were that if they opted in, they could tell us who all their friends were, okay? So they told us who all their friends were! This is very much how local campaigns work, right? People sit in a room. It’s a really small thing. All of their biggest supporters surround the table, and they, like, circle the names of the people that they know and that they’re gonna outreach to. And they figure out how to fill in the gaps of the people that they don’t know. The Obama campaign just did this on a digital — in a digital level, on a much larger level. But we were actually able to ingest the entire social network, social network of the U.S. that’s on Facebook, which is most… That’s most people.”

RUSH: “We were able to ingest,” which means they sucked it up with be they Hoovered it, they swallowed it, “the entire social network.” Cambridge Analytica? Fifty million ma! This babe is bragging at a meeting how brilliant Obama was, and she’s saying exactly what I said yesterday. This stuff has become the new definition, the new way of doing grassroots politics where you never have to go to grassroots. You sit in your ivory tower, and you suck up all the personal data that Facebook lets you have.

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and Facebook let Obama have all of their data — and this babe, Carol Davidsen, is bragging about it! “We were actually able to ingest the entire social network, social network of the U.S.! That is on Facebook, which is … most people.” She’s happy, she’s bragging, and they were being heralded as the new political geniuses by the same media that is now trying to destroy Facebook. Now, that sound bite, again, was 2015, just three years ago.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, I have one more sound bite in Carol Davidsen. I don’t have time to get into it before the end of the hour. Her title was Director of Obama for America’s Integration and Media Analytics. It was her job to Hoover up all of your data and everybody else’s on Facebook so that it could be leveraged into persuading you with who knows what kind of techniques to hate Romney and Republicans and vote Obama. And she’s proud of it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Carol Davidsen, I want to read to you from her LinkedIn profile. She served as director, Integration and Media Analytics for Obama for America. That’s his PAC. It used to be Organizing for America preelection, back in 2007 and so forth. After he got elected it became Obama for America. And she was the head of Integration and Media Analytics November 2011 through November 2012. She was based in Chicago. She called herself responsible for “The Optimizer” and “Narwal.”

She added on Linkedin: “Narwhal was a real time scalable data integration and campaign API platform that fused together facts gathered about multiple identities into a single unified profile available to every arm of the campaign.”

That’s computer lingo for she was able to get all of this massive Facebook data at scale and put it all together, multiple identities into a single unified profile of voter type and then make that available to every arm of the campaign. In other words, she was able to get access to all of social media’s user data and find, using APIs — those are programming interfaces. An API is what a developer is granted by Apple, say, to make an app for the iPhone, through the software development kit.

And so she was using essentially a program, an API, that worked with Facebook to assemble all this data into however many different types of voters there were based on demographics, geography, any number of things, and collate all this so that they could come up with a few messages, a few themes that would reach gazillions of people. And she needed all of the Facebook data to do it, and Zuckerberg happily turned it over!

Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, happily turned all of that over to Obama, and in this case Carol Davidsen. Let me read to you from that Jim Rutenberg piece in the New York Times in 2013. “The Obama campaign started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information. In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the users’ Facebook news feeds.

“Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters,” that Carol Davidsen was assembling. Then they could find potential donors, and they were also able to find unregistered voters.

Now, folks, this operation that I just detailed for you here — and I’m just quoting the New York Times — this is so far beyond anything Cambridge Analytica did. They paid people to use their app to take a personality test. And only 250,000 or so people did, and those people were asked to allow Cambridge Analytica to look at their list of friends. That would have netted a tiny fraction of what the Obama campaign got, without paying for anything. Facebook willingly gave it.

And Facebook knew what the Obama team was doing, and they turned a blind eye to it. They said it was okay, as long as they stopped doing it after November 7th, i.e., after Election Day. Because it goes back to what I said. Zuckerberg and these guys, they have to publicly profess their love for everything liberal, be it climate change, be it massive regulation, be it anti-capitalism, whatever it is, government taking over health care, they have to support it publicly.

Now, Zuckerberg’s finding out what happens when you become an enemy of the state. Now his firm is being targeted for this massive regulation that his crony relationship with Obama was designed to prevent. But Obama’s long gone. Now it’s up to liberals, Federal Trade Commission, liberals in the deep state, Democrat Party. There’s a gigantic falling out.

Now, I want to play the second sound bite of Carol Davidsen but actually the first one again to put this in perspective. And remember, this is the babe that ran the data analytics operation for Obama for one year. One year prior to the November 12 election. And her work ended after that election. She talked about it, she bragged about it at a Personal Democracy Forum in June of 2015 in New York City. Here’s sound bite 1 of two.

DAVIDSEN: Facebook 2012 Election had the ability for people to opt in. The Obama campaign, like, rocked this, right? We got people to opt in. And the privacy policies at that time on Facebook were that if they opted in, they could tell us who all their friends were, okay? So they told us who all their friends were!

RUSH: Stop the tape. You notice how chippy this babe sounds? Oh, man, she’s happy, she proud, and she can’t wait to tell people what they did because she knows she’s not gonna get in any trouble. No. She’s a heroine. She worked for Obama! And so she was one of the geniuses the New York Times wrote about in 2013, and she couldn’t be happier as she sits here recounting this bragging about it to everybody.

DAVIDSEN: This is very much how local campaigns work, right? People sit in a room. It’s a really small thing. All of their biggest supporters surround the table, and they, like, circle the names of the people that they know and that they’re gonna outreach to. And they figure out how to fill in the gaps of the people that they don’t know. The Obama campaign just did this on a digital — in a digital level, on a much larger level. But we were actually able to ingest the entire social network, social network of the U.S. that’s on Facebook, which is most… That’s most people.

RUSH: Bragging about it. Hoovered up everything. Just sucked up the entire social network, and they were praised as geniuses. There wasn’t any panic. There wasn’t any allegations of collusion or rigging or cheating or any of that, because it was all in service to The One, Barack Hussein O. Here is the second bite where she —

DAVIDSEN: That freaked Facebook out, right? So they shut off the feature. Well, the Republicans never built an app to do that. So the data is out there. You can’t take it back, right? So the Democrats have this information. So when they look at a voter file and someone comes to them, they can immediately be like, “Oh. Here are all the other people that they know, and here are people that they can help us persuade because they’re really good friends with this person.” The Republicans do not have that information and will not get that information, right? Now there’s a disadvantage of information that to me seems unfair. But I’m not Facebook. So this is the reality.

RUSH: Does this woman and her speech pattern remind anybody of Hillary? I mean, this woman says, right? Right? Like Hillary says “you know.” “Right? Republicans, they don’t have this, right? Screw them anyway. The Republicans don’t have any of this, right? Democrats have it all. Freaks Facebook out, right? So they shut off the feature. Well, Republicans never built an app do that.

Oh, yes, they did, and all hell’s breaking loose because of it now! So this woman’s bragging about the fact that Democrats have this data forever no matter what Facebook does, but the Republicans don’t have any, and they’re never gonna get it ’cause the Republicans are a bunch of deadbeat dingbats that don’t know what they’re doing. Except the Mercers came along and got it. Now all hell is breaking loose.

Let’s compare speech patterns. Do you know that there is a Hillary Clinton doll that is in development, and if it passes through all the phases, it’s not gonna be long before you can get one.

(playing of spoof)

RUSH: I just wanted you to see the similar speech patterns there, Carol Davidsen and Hillary, you know, Clinton, right? Right? We got those Republicans, right? Right? They got nothing, right?

Now, yesterday in Las Vegas at the Shoptalk Retail & Ecommerce Innovation conference, Facebook vice president for marketing Carolyn Everson, not to be confused with Carol Davidsen. This is a different woman, Carolyn Everson had this to say about Cambridge Analytica acquiring data from Facebook profiles.

EVERSON: We are unbelievably outraged and beyond disturbed at the allegations that data was misused or our policies have been violated. We suspended them at the time. We asked them to reassure us that all of that data had really been essentially destroyed. And they certified, all the parties involved certified that that was the case. We recently have come to find out that that may not be the case.

RUSH: So this woman wants us to believe Facebook was outraged, outraged that their users’ privacy was violated, as though they’d be outraged that gambling was happening at a casino. The fact of the matter is, Facebook happily, willingly let the Obama team soak up every user data profile on Facebook. And the Obama team’s out bragging about it.

But now they want us to believe that they’re outraged over what Cambridge Analytica did, 270,000 users versus Facebook’s nearly one billion? Stop and think of that number, by the way. Folks, Facebook’s business model is selling your user data. That is Facebook’s business model. That’s how they amortize. They’ve got a billion people. They have not had that much success selling advertising. Google owns that. Their business model is selling user data, and here this woman’s acting outraged that they’ve been punked over this?

And let’s go to the whistleblower before we hit the break, Christopher Wylie. This is the pink-haired, gay, vegan Canadian, Cambridge Analytica guy, and guess what? This thing was missing something yesterday that now has been found. A Russian. Yes, my friends, Cambridge Analytica had a Russian involved in this. This is Christopher Wylie on Good Morning America this morning.

WYLIE: We would ask people to fill out psychological surveys. That app would then harvest their data from Facebook and then that app would crawl through their friends network and pull all of the data from their friends also. I think that it’s really concerning that the head psychologist that we were using, Alexander Kogan, was working on a Russian funded project in Russia on psychological profiling of people.

RUSH: (laughing) Can’t let go of it. So Cambridge Analytica was using a Russian shrink to help analyze the Facebook user data that Cambridge Analytica got.


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