RUSH: Let’s move on to this Facebook business here. And let’s remember why this is happening. By the way, I need you to have audio sound bites 1, 2, and 3 standing by.

Let me first ask, why is Zuckerberg in Washington today testifying before a bunch of different congressional committees? Why is he there? Cambridge Analytica. What happened with Cambridge Analytica? What’s Cambridge Analytica got to do with anything? What is that about? Okay. So Cambridge Analytica is a research organization related to the evil Mercer family second only in evilness to the Koch brothers.

The Mercers liked Steve Bannon and they supported Ted Cruz. They support right wing causes like Carl’s, Jr. They’re not to be trusted. And it turns out that Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to help gather some information about people that might have helped them target advertising during the 2016 election. And the way Cambridge Analytica did it was a professor from somewhere decided to put together a little psychological test as a game for Facebook users to take.

It was entirely optional, you could take the quiz, take the test if you wanted to, people did, and that data was harvested and ostensibly it was used to help Trump, which means Zuckerberg has a lot to answer for. And that’s why he’s in Washington. He is in Washington and he’s in the dock, and he’s under the spotlight, under the klieg lights because he allowed his company, up to now exclusively used by the Democrats, to be used maybe to help Trump.

So Zuckerberg has some explaining to do. Zuckerberg’s gonna be asked, why the hell should we not punish you? What are you doing helping Trump? Why the hell should we not regulate you?

What you should know is Zuckerberg is not gonna be under oath. Did you know that? Mark Zuckerberg is not going to be under oath. And I’m gonna tell you what this is today. It is political theater. It is political theater designed to service a lie and a myth. The lie and the myth is that Donald Trump, after colluding with the Russians, figured that wasn’t enough. Trump then had to steal your data from Facebook via Cambridge Analytica in order to have a chance to beat the only woman who should be president ever, Hillary Clinton. And that’s why this is going on. This is the sole purpose.

The sole purpose of the theater is to make it look like Zuckerberg might have his company taken away from him, make it look like Zuckerberg might have to face dire federal regulations, to make it look like Facebook agrees that it screwed up. Zuckerberg is here to apologize. He is here to beg forgiveness. He is here hoping that the United States government will give him another chance to screw the Republicans and not let ’em in again like it happened here.

He’s hoping that the federal government, the Democrats, will make it look like he’s being punished but really isn’t so that all of his buddies in the media can write about how Zuckerberg has grown and learned his lesson and is now going to make sure that your data is only available to Democrats. Uh, they won’t say that, of course, but that’s gonna be the upshot of this.

Let me ask you a question, folks. Who made any of you join Facebook? Your kids. That’s a legitimate answer. She’s saying she wouldn’t be a Facebook member if it weren’t for her kids. She wanted to stay in touch with her kids, that’s where her kids were, so she joined Facebook. Makes perfect sense.

Okay. Who made your kids join Facebook? Who is this mysterious avatar that forced your kids and everybody else to join Facebook and give up their personal data? Who forced every one of you to select the news feed that you use? Who forced any of you to sign up for Facebook and start sharing every bit of personal information about yourself because you want to be famous, you want to have likes, you want to have people get to know who you are, who made you do that? I’m waiting.

Because everybody wants to be a victim of Facebook, right? Everybody wants to be a victim. Facebook stole my data. Facebook used my data. Facebook is using my data for advertising. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. The NSA steals your data. You gave it to Facebook. And I would dare say, my friends, that Facebook has more personal information on you than the NSA could ever hope to have.

Facebook, run by that guy Zuckerberg that you see on TV. He looks like a kid when he’s got the T-shirt on. This guy knows more about every American than the NSA does. And you gave it to him. The NSA steals it from you. Why isn’t the NSA up there being asked to justify what they do when Zuckerberg, all he did was open business, say, “Hi. Sign up for my” whatever it is “Facebook, and you can meet girls and learn about friends and so forth and share pictures and what have you, and then I’m gonna know everything about you,” and people did it.

Zuckerberg now has to be punished. Except he’s not gonna be punished. It has to look like Zuckerberg is being called on the carpet. It’s gonna look like the adults of which there are none anymore in Washington I don’t think, are going to spank Zuckerberg and make him promise never to do it again. Meaning never allow another Republican group to do what you’ve helped the Democrats do.

A series of stories. Daily Beast: “Zuckerberg Gaslights Congress Before The Hearings Even Start.” By the way, what does that mean? When they say Zuckerberg gaslights Congress, what does that mean? I looked it up in a vernacular dictionary. It’s not there. A gaslight is a gaslight. It’s a pole with a lamp on it that’s lit by gas. When you gaslight Congress, do you lie to ’em?

“Mark Zuckerberg swears he found out just two weeks ago that bad actors were harvesting users’ private info by the millions.” Zuckerberg says he only found out two weeks ago that Cambridge Analytica was doing what it was doing. He didn’t know. He knew, just like Obama when he found out half the things he knew when he watched the news. Zuckerberg found out about it in the media.

But the Daily Beast says here that Facebook was alerted long, long before that. Facebook wasn’t alerted to anything! Facebook is set up to Hoover your data! Even this story. “Facebook was alerted long ago to the fact that bad actors were harvesting users’ private information.” Facebook hadn’t been alerted to that. It’s how it’s set up.

“Facebook was warned five years ago that the ‘reverse-lookup’ feature in its search engine could be used to harvest names, profiles, and phone numbers for virtually all its users. But the company ignored the red flags until last week, after it happened.

“In prepared testimony to Congress released Monday, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that malefactors had used the reverse-lookup ‘to link people’s public Facebook information to a phone number,’ he wrote (PDF). ‘When we found out about the abuse, we shut this feature down.'”

By the way, Zuckerberg snuck into the Senate building today, the Capitol building. Well, it’s not the Capitol. Wherever the hearing is. He managed to get into the building through back ways and a freight elevator. So there are no photo-ops of Zuckerberg going in to testify. Now, I’m told that a lot of media people think Zuckerberg’s gonna get raked over the coals, that he’s gonna face a lot of tough questions, and he might, but it isn’t gonna mean anything because I’m telling you right now there isn’t gonna be any legislation forthcoming.

There isn’t gonna be, at least not in the immediate aftermath. There will be no legislation regulating Facebook. Too many politicians want access to what’s there. They’re not gonna regulate it. They’re not gonna make it harder to get. Zuckerberg will suffer what appears to be a public spanking but that’s it.

On the tech blogs that I read today, there is a story on every one of them, on every one of the tech blogs with almost the exact headline, which is, “Here’s how to check whether your Facebook data was shared with Cambridge Analytica.” What this means is that the sponges, the so-called journalists at tech media have no idea that the Obama administration had virtual access to everybody’s user data on Facebook!

No, we’re carrying forward the narrative that Cambridge Analytica’s a bunch of sneaky SOBs, and Cambridge Analytica, a bunch of conservative Republicans, they came in and they fooled you and they tricked you, and they unscrupulously Hoovered up all of your data to run ads to make you vote for Trump. And so all the tech blogs writing to all the Millennials advising them how to check whether their Facebook data was shared with Cambridge Analytica.

One typical story. “The biggest controversy over the way Facebook data ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica was how it got there. The company not only got access to the data of anyone naive enough to give permission to a third-party ‘personality quiz,’ but Facebook allowed the app some access to the data of their friends also.”

And it goes on to explain how you can click on a certain link and then follow a couple steps and find out if Cambridge Analytica knows who you are, if they’ve got your data and if they tried to trick you into voting for that reprobate, Donald Trump. The tech blogs, useful idiots for the left, dutifully following any narrative they are given. It is funny to watch.

By the way, I read Zuckerberg, some of his testimony. Zuckerberg’s testimony was prewritten. It was released and it makes scant reference to the fact that the Obama campaign used all users’ data, all of it. It’s amazing, everybody’s focusing on Cambridge Analytica, as though some great crime has occurred in social media. Eight-seven million people potentially had their data used. Potentially? Eight-seven million out of at least a billion Facebook users.

So let’s go to the audio sound bites. And let’s actually revisit something we played for you at the time and two weeks ago. We’re going back here to June 7th of 2015, nearly three years ago, New York City, at the Personal Democracy Forum. Carol Davidsen is the vice president of political technology at Rentrak. She worked on the Obama campaign in 2012.

The New York Times, after learning of what you’ll hear in this sound bite, wrote a couple of stories in the New York Times Magazine how Obama’s tech team were a bunch of geniuses, geniuses because they figured out how to access the data of every Facebook user. They were geniuses. But now with Cambridge Analytica, 87 million, they’re criminals, and you who fell for it are victims. Here is Carol Davidsen. We have two sound bites. Number one.

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 actually able to ingest,” as in suck up, Hoover, collect, whatever, “the entire social network, the entire social network of the U.S. that’s on Facebook, which is most people.” We were actually able to ingest all of it. Now, couple this with her attitude here. This woman is very braggadocio, confident, even a bit arrogant about it. “Facebook 2012 election had the ability for people to opt in. The Obama campaign, like, rocked this.” Rocked this? ‘Cause Facebook was running a campaign itself in 2012, they wanted people to opt in and join whatever they were doing in the election, be part of it.

The Obama babe here is saying we got people to do it, we got them to opt in. The privacy policies at the time on Facebook were that if people opted in, they could tell us who all their friends were. Facebook was begging people to join this effort, the Obama people helped them decide to do it and once they’d done that then they could give them the names of everybody they knew. And so she brags (imitating Davidsen), “They told us who all of their friends were. This is very much how local campaigns work, right? And we did this, and we did this, right? And we did this we did this, right? And then we were actually able to ingest entirely social network.”

They were called geniuses for this, and there’s not a single person that’s gonna bring this up today. There’s not a single person that’s gonna ask Zuckerberg, “Wait a minute, Cambridge Analytica? That’s chump change compared to what you did for the Obama campaign.” Here’s one more bite from Carol Davidsen.

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: It’s unfair, they don’t care about it being unfair. Republicans don’t have it, Obama did have it, completely, totally fair, and Facebook apparently didn’t even know they were helping out, which is also a crock. Facebook and Google practically lived at the White House for a period of time.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: And now we move to April 30th, 2013, Beverly Hills at the Milken Institute 2013 Global Conference during a panel discussion entitled, “In the twenty-first century, data is king.” The Obama 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina said this about the campaign’s use of user data.

MESSINA: We decided on the first day of the campaign to use data across department, uhh, because it was obviously the best avenue to the truth. And we ended up using data to inform almost every major decision we did in the campaign. And we had a singular goal to run a personalized campaign where you got a different campaign than you did, uh, all based on our ability to move you and persuade you to vote and support Barack Obama. And there’s 332 electoral votes that shows it worked.

RUSH: So where did this guy get the data? This guy says we love to use the data, we decided the first day to use data across department. Where’d you get the data, Messina? Number 4.

MESSINA: We built this thing called targeted sharing. It allowed us to use Facebook to persuade people. We spent a billion dollars —

RUSH: Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It allowed you to use Facebook to persuade people, you spent a billion dollars to do what?

MESSINA: 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 on to Facebook through BarackObama.com and they saw a 20-second Michelle Obama video (’cause 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% of them voted for Barack Obama.

RUSH: It’s sure as me sounds like everybody’s using Facebook to go out there and persuade and manipulate voters. What’s wrong with Cambridge Analytica doing it?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: And one other little bit of news about Facebook then back to the phones. Facebook’s largest Black Lives Matter page was a scam. It was an Australian scam. “What appeared to be the biggest ‘Black Lives Matter’ page on Facebook was actually ‘a scam with ties to a middle-aged white man in Australia.'” Not Russia, Australia, according to CNN Tech is the website.

“Just as troubling, CNN reported that Facebook initially declined to remove the page when contacted, even as other counterparts in the industry quickly moved to do so.” The fake page “had some 700,000 followers as well as a Facebook Group with 40,000 members.”

So Mr. Snerdley was actually blown away by what Jim Messina admitted here in his second sound bite. Let’s review this. So the final six days of the campaign, six million people logged on to Facebook through the BarackObama.com. Obama had an app that tied into Facebook. Six million people logged on to Facebook through Obama.com. Those people saw a 20-second Michelle Obama video, ’cause everybody loves Michelle, Messina said. At the end of the 20-second video, the Obama people had matched their data with Facebook’s data, and then he said we gave them five of their best friends, the users, we gave ’em five of their best friends who were undecided.

How did they know that? How did the Obama team know that five friends of all of these users were undecided? And then they put a little button that said, “Click here to send these friends of yours a video,” “Click here to send them information.” And 78% of the people who had the buttons clicked and received the video or information voted for Barack Obama. They were spammed. Messina is admitting they figured out a way to spam Facebook users.

By the way, this figure, 78% of them voted for Obama? Nobody, nobody that I know of yet has ever given that much persuasive power to anywhere in social media. It’s one of the counterarguments to all of this panic about the Russian trolls on social media. And the answer to it is, most people’s vote is not determined by an ad that they see on social media.

If they Obama people claim that they could secure 78% of a sample audience voting for their candidate because of what they sent them in social media, that would be the end of TV advertising. That would be the end of candidate interviews if that’s true. That’s a little out there.