How Facebook and Google Win By Embedding in Campaigns

[dufus]

A new report from the Campaign for Accountability details the questionable role of internet platforms in election races.

“Facebook plays a positive role by helping leaders like you connect with voters,” Mark Zuckerberg told European Parliament members in May.

The CEO’s appearance was meant to clarify Facebook’s influence on global politics—one of several testimonies that arose from this year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. Yet, despite the interrogation of Zuckerberg and other tech leaders, questions about their companies’ intimacy with election campaigns have gone largely unanswered.

 

But an investigation from the Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit and ethics watchdog group, reveals new details about the political embeds of Facebook and Google. It calls the discreet relationship a conflict of interest, and a surprisingly unregulated one. Campaigns receive free tools and services, it says, while platforms curry insights and powerful political allegiances.

“We are so close with [the campaigns] that we are typically sitting in their offices or having daily calls,” said Ali Jae Henke, a Google employee embedded in a 2016 Republican presidential campaign.

Sometimes Google’s embeds switched between roles—problematically, between ad sales and lobbying, the Campaign for Accountability found via LinkedIn. Google’s head of international elections outreach, Lee Dunn, formerly led the company’s White House outreach, for instance. In this latter role, Dunn had lobbied the Trump administration on digital taxes and copyright. Google’s team lead for US politics, Rob Saliterman, sold ads to campaigns while simultaneously lobbying lawmakers on various policies, the report notes.

Google has been aiding campaigns since 2012. Its consultants have helped to target voters, design ads, produce YouTube videos, and craft messaging. For example, presidential candidate Rand Paul’s staffers visited Google HQ for “ideation” sessions. A campaign like Paul’s may have received “digital real estate that commercial clients could not access.” In practice, this included things like “candidate cards,” which let candidates push their views in quote boxes near the top of Google search results. This effectively served as free advertising, the group argues. In one instance, Donald Trump’s cards appeared in results for a primary debate in which he never participated. Meanwhile, the Google staffer who consulted Trump’s team on its cards also helped with the campaign’s advertising plan.

 

Facebook—about which Trump’s “digital guru,” Therese Hong, said, “Without [it], we wouldn’t have won”—has also offered to assist campaigns since 2012, the Campaign for Accountability notes. It’s “political influencer” tool, for example, guaranteed that ads would be seen by politically engaged users. The Trump team reportedly spent $70 million on Facebook advertising, running 50,000 to 60,000 political ads each day. Trump received an alleged $250 million in donations thanks to Facebook’s ad targeting—a success that Zuckerberg congratulated Trump on in a phone call after his election, BuzzFeed News reported.

At Facebook, staff were allegedly sorted according to political affiliation, “making it easy to deploy them to campaigns from both parties.” That’s according to Daniel Kreiss and Shannon C. McGregor, authors of Technology Firms Shape Political Communication, a paper published in 2017 that relied on interviews with Facebook and Google employees, and was heavily cited by the Campaign for Accountability. The Trump campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, reportedly requested Republican embeds.

Less surprisingly, the report discovered that Google and Facebook often tapped the expertise of political insiders. At Google and YouTube, nearly 40 percent of 70 people hired to work on political teams possessed a background in politics. At Facebook, that number was more than 50 percent of 32 people hired to do similar work. (Note that these percentages were based on available LinkedIn data.)

 

The Campaign for Accountability also flags the “porous boundary” between advertising and political affairs at Facebook and Google, raising questions about illegal in-kind contributions.

“Generally,” the report quotes from the Federal Election Commission, “if an individual provides services to a campaign during paid working hours, the employer makes a contribution to the campaign.”

According to the report:

Google might argue that they provide the consulting because the campaign is buying ads. However, the value of that consulting—separate and apart from the ads—is significant. Presidential campaigns paid tens of millions of dollars for digital consulting during the 2016 cycle, according to FEC data, though opaque and inconsistent reporting makes it impossible to determine exactly how much.

Google says it makes no contributions as a company to support political candidates. (Corporations are barred from donating directly to candidates’ campaigns from their treasury funds but can support outside groups as long as they don’t coordinate with the campaign.)

Zuckerberg, when asked about this by Congress, replied that no Facebook employee worked “full-time” for the Trump or Clinton campaigns. And that staff were specifically trained to comply with election laws.

But the nonprofit argues the roles of political staff at Facebook are too nebulous to be considered normal—that is, Facebook cannot claim that the work it does for election campaigns is the same as for other clients.

 

Still, it notes, both companies continue to hire for these positions. One Facebook job posting seeks a person “to help build and sell Facebook s advertising solutions to significant advertisers in the US Politics industry, specifically to Democratic candidates, campaigns, and advocacy groups.”

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne5k8z/how-facebook-and-google-win-by-embedding-in-political-campaigns

 

 

 

[steven36]

On 8/19/2018 at 5:08 AM, dufus said:

Google says it makes no contributions as a company to support political candidates.

 They contribute  by shadow banning and  the actual   banning  of politicians  and journalist they have the power of  who you actuality see on YouTube and Google search witch is worth a whole lot more than cash is to the campaign . 

 

But all  of Silicon Valley supports the  Democratic ticket  they just do it in different ways they have there fair share  of players who actually donate cash as well.

 

Ten big Silicon Valley money players behind this November’s U.S. midterm elections

https://www.recode.net/2018/8/20/17693048/silicon-valley-tech-donors-midterms-2018-democrats-donald-trump-list

 

All that money they had behind them last election didn't help them all..  because you cant buy a persons vote.

[knowledge-Spammer]

shadow banning  is big nowdays  on all things like utube google  and much more

[dMog]

everyone is looking for power,,,doing this gives them huge power.it used to be money gave you power, that still holds true today but wielding the power of what people can see online, or in this case what they are denied to see is where a lot of that power is now held

[dufus]

knowledge is power

 

 

[steven36]

8 hours ago, dufus said:

knowledge is power

That's right people that have knowledge can bypass the the middle man's platform and get there news right from the source , i have like 20 some news channels i can chose from . And the American people  viewing the main stream left wing media has on been on the decline . We dont buy into there fake news.

 

Quote

 

The average audience for the evening newscasts for ABC, CBS and NBC decreased by 7% in 2017, down to 5.2 million, compared with 5.6 million in 2016, according to comScore TV Essentials® data. (Average audience is defined as the average number of TVs tuned to a program throughout a time period.)

 

In 2018, Pew Research Center began using data from comScore TV Essentials® for this audience analysis, and as such, the current fact sheet includes figures for only the past two years. Previous versions of this fact sheet included data stretching back to 2008 and used data from Nielsen Media Research. Those data are available in the 2017 archived fact sheet. Because of various differences between the two sets of data points, figures from prior years are not directly comparable with the data shown here.

 

Average audience for morning news programs from ABC, CBS and NBC also declined over the past year, down 10% in 2017, to about 3 million.

 

Average audience for the network TV Sunday morning political talk shows on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – This Week, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday and Meet the Press, respectively – remained stable, down 1% in 2017, staying at about 2 million.

 

http://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/network-news/

 

Who needs biased  network news  when you can tune into C-Span and watch congress live instead of reading about it a day latter with the whole story twisted around from the way it happened?

[dufus]

When Media Mergers Limit More Than Competition

1983, 50 companies owned 90 percent of the media consumed by Americans. By 2012, just six companies controlled that 90 percent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/26/business/a-21st-century-fox-time-warner-merger-would-narrow-already-dwindling-competition.html

 

Concentration of media ownership

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership

 

not just us look wikipedia for owner in other country