Take a look at the US Attorney press releases for public corruption.
Notice something about the Obama years.
I can only imagine what 2009-2012 looked like, doughnuts.
https:// www.justice.gov/usao/pressreleases?f%5B0%5D=field_pr_topic%3A3956
In politics, a unified computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of potential voters is at the forefront of campaign technology – and was critical to Barack Obama’s 2012 election. That year, four years after Sandberg’s arrival, Facebook started co-sponsoring presidential debates in the Republican primaries. In 2015, Facebook rolled out features to allow advertisers to – people who like lots of political pages, click on political ads and share content from political organisations.
Tools such as these made Facebook extraordinarily profitable, with sales of about $40bn in 2017. But they also left the company susceptible to privacy violations, and criticisms that it was surveilling its own users or corrupting the democratic process.
“Targeted advertising allows a campaign to say completely different, possibly conflicting things to different groups. Is that democratic?” said the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, in March last year.
The problem is, targeted advertising is Facebook’s lifeblood – and that of the broader online marketing industry.
“They are in a massive business model bind. To acknowledge the larger issue is to admit there’s a serious threat to their core business model,” said the entrepreneur and writer John Battelle. “That’s why Sheryl, who really runs the business, hasn’t been full-throated about this.”
https:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/29/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-cambridge-analytica