Nothing much to ‘like’ about political tool Facebook

With the proverbial horse long out of the barn, the ubiquitous Facebook is now reported to be slamming the door on Barack Hussein Obama. “An upcoming code change means Obama’s groundbreaking 2012 outreach on the site won’t happen again.” (Yahoo, Nov. 17, 2014)

Thanks a lot for nothing, Mark Zuckerberg. The fix is already in and you, now advertising for an Executive Amnesty on an unwilling America, have already handed the potential collapse of Western society to the O Man on a silver Facebook platter. Not much to ‘like’ there.

“Barack Obama’s reelection campaign pioneered a pathway for political campaigns to reach voters through Facebook when it released an app that helped supporters target their friends with Obama-related material. (Yahoo) “But as the 2016 presidential campaign approaches, Facebook is rolling out a change that will prevent future campaigns from doing this, closing the door on one of the most sophisticated social targeting efforts ever undertaken. “It’s a fairly significant shift,” said Teddy Goff, who was Obama’s digital director in 2012, and oversaw the effort that helped the Obama campaign gain a Facebook following of 45 million users that year. Goff’s team used Facebook and other tools to register more than a million voters online and to raise $690 million online in 2011 and 2012. “The thing we did that will be most affected--by which I mean rendered impossible--by the changes they're making is the targeted sharing tool,” Goff said.

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“More than 1 million Obama supporters in 2012 installed the campaign’s Facebook app. These supporters were given the option to share their friend list with the Obama campaign. Goff said most of the app users did so. And when they did, Goff’s team would then “run those friend lists up against the voter file, and make targeted suggestions as to who [supporters] should be sharing stuff with.” “This was a powerful new form of voter outreach. The Obama campaign had concluded that many voters — especially younger Americans — viewed TV and other forms of advertising from the campaign with suspicion and skepticism. But they were still open to messages that came from friends and acquaintances. “The key to getting persuasive messages in front of persuadable voters going forward, the campaign decided, was to have them come from people they knew. “It's extremely powerful for a campaign to be able to say to [a user], ‘Hey, here are your persuadable friends, ranked in order of where they live: Ohio first, Virginia second, et cetera. Go share this video directly with them,'” Goff said.” In this run down about getting elected through Facebook friends, It’s downright comical to see that the Romney campaign started doing this--but only in October, a month before the presidential election. There goes one of Karl Rove’s boys again, bringing up the rear as usual. The problem is that when wishy-washy Facebook came along, it dragged the waiting throwaway society millennial generation into the swamp. Insipid click-of-a-mouse ‘likes’ became more Internet-dominant than meaningful human values such as patriotism, love, kindness and all but forgotten, altruism. Life online became one big kumbaya camp of ‘like’. Not many realized that people who ‘like’ in a split second can hate in a split second too. Facebook’s ugly step sister Twitter opened the floodgates to trolls who could now replace poison pen letters with 140-character anonymous ‘tweets’, including ones regularly sent to the loved ones of teenagers who were harassed to the point of suicide by peers. The only ones who love Facebook and Twitter more than the Obama regime are the decapitating infamous terrorists who use social media to fundraise and recruit. Those struggling through the current economy in small businesses may have thought their no-cost Facebook accounts were forever. Mark Zuckerberg, after all, shouldn’t have to gauge the little people having reached the billionaire plateau. But these days, Facebook is weaning millions off free service and you have to pay Facebook for what were, only yesterday, free ‘friends’ through ‘likes’. Meanwhile, millions know that Facebook would never slam the door on Obama without providing him easy access through another. Staying on the Internet has been a rough and bumpy ride that’s guaranteed to get rougher and bumpier. But unlike Zuckerberg many young people have grown up along the way. They know it’s better to be loved and respected than to be Facebook ‘liked’. They know as sure as soaring energy costs that there’s nothing much to ‘like’ about Facebook .