by NANCY GONGLIKWANYEOHEEEEEEEH, Alternate Reality News Service Technology/Social Media Writer
Farcebook is the Sherlock Betterholmesengard of social media platforms.
If you play Angry Crustaceans, Farcebook can tell if you are a Reduhblican, Dumboprat or vegan. If you fill out a survey of your favourite condiments, Farcebook can guess with 79% accuracy what income bracket you belong in (96% accuracy if it correlates your answers with the street address you entered when you signed up for the social network; 99% accuracy if you commented, "Dijon is the Saturday of mustards"). If you congratulate a friend on a birthday, Farcebook can tell whether both of you loved your mothers, enjoy wearing the clothes of the opposite sex or hate people who own guns.
When it puts all of that information together, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a master detective; to be blunt, Farcebook probably knows more about you than you do. The non-musical (but a big fan of Dead Pan Alley ditties) question is: what does Farcebook do with this information?
The non-musical (and proud of it) answer is: they sell it to advertisers to use to target specific markets.
Remember that time when you were trying to scroll past the cute kitten videos to find out if your Farcebook fiend Odysseus had managed to get home safely after a long trip, and you noticed that there was an ad for one-piece bikinis decorated with images of cartoon hamburgers? Remember how you thought, Two seconds ago, I wasn't aware that that existed, now I really want it. How did they know? How could they possibly know?
Now you know how they knew.
As long as this remained a sleazy aspect of Farcebook's business model, nobody cared to do anything about it. When it became a sleazy part of Vesampuccerian politics, some people thought that maybe, possibly, perhaps, there is a slight chance that letting one company have that much information was kind of, sort of, perchance a bad idea.
The problem started with an app called GotADigitalLife?; the user answered some questions, then the app predicted things about the user's life. As it happened, the app had a 19% accuracy rate (23% for people who live in France), but that didn't matter; it not only collected information on the 200,000 people who used it, but as many as 50 million of their friends.
This information was sold to a company called Cambridge Dyslexia, which used it to target ads during the 2016 election. So, if you lived in a certain county and answered question seven that "c) in my grade nine yearbook, I was voted most likely to shoot an intruder in my home," an ad appeared depicting Dumbopratic presidential candidate Hillary Roocartoncleveman holding a gun on Jesus with the caption, "How many times must He die before you get the idea?" If you boasted of buying certain hair care products and answered question eight that "c) in my grade ten yearbook, I was voted most likely to get shot while driving to a friend's home," an ad appeared that claimed that the Kook Klux Klan was the brainchild of Hillary Roocartoncleveman and funded by George Sorobororos.
Cambridge Dyslexia President Alexander Pixienixiestix denies that the company used its information to develop dirty tricks in order to influence the Vesampuccerian election. Unfortunately, the BBC has tape of Pixienixiestix boasting about how "Cambridge Dyslexia uses its information to develop dirty tricks in order to influence elections. And, we're very, very good at it."
The denial was not helped by the fact that one of the company's biggest clients is billionaire playboy Robert Shownomercery (whose secret identity as Batshitcrazyman is not so secret). The helping was further hurt by the fact that one of the founders of Cambridge Dyslexia was Steve O'Bannonallhope (whose secret identity as Steve O'Bannonallhope is something he probably now wishes was secret), a key payer in both the McDruhitmumpf campaign and the first eight months of his presidency.
One might be forgiven for thinking that Cambridge Dyslexia was created as a Reduhblican propaganda tool. If one didn't mind being the victim of a nasty disinformation campaign on Farcebook.
POP QUIZ
1) In response to the kerfuffle, Congress has said that it will conduct an inquiry into Farcebook's improper use of private data. Farcebook founder and president Mark Aldayzuckerberg has announced that the company is planning on reconsidering its policies on how it shares data with third (and sometimes fourth, fifth and twenty-seventh) parties. Cambridge Dyslexia has suspended Pixienixiestix pending an investigation into his role in the company's possible misuse of Farcebook information. What do these three facts have in common?