Comment by mapontosevenths
19 hours ago
You may be missing the actual crimes.
You're right that the tools were hype, and that they didn't work. So why, despite knowing that Cambridge Analytica tools were useless, did Trumo keep paying it?
Well, Robert and Rebekah Mercer were primary backers of the Trump campaign, and they also owned a major stake in Cambridge Analytica. Giving something like $49 million dollars to Trump and Co.
What are the odds they made a profit on the deal?
There were actual crimes but it was essentially the Russian government hacking email campaigns related to Hillary Clinton and drip-feeding them to the press. On the ad side there's none that I'm aware of.
From the article: "Jurors also found Facebook misled the public about investigations into data brokers following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, finding the company liable for over 2 million violations."
A jury just found that there were more than 43 million crimes (total) committed on the ad side. I think you're saying that the illegal data collection wasn't related to the advertising end, but it was. That's why they did it. Whether it was actually useful or not is irrelevant.
More importantly to me, the billionaires using it to launder their bribes to the US president probably won't ever be convicted, but that does not mean they aren't just low class crooks who can afford good lawyers.