UPDATE: In an explosive story published online last night by Buzzfeed, a 2016 memo from a Facebook vice president revealed a corporate attitude that FB must continue to build up its users, even if that means the social media network contributes to a loss of lives.

On June 18, 2016, one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted lieutenants circulated an extraordinary memo weighing the costs of the company’s relentless quest for growth.

“We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified,” wrote VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth (pictured above). “… So we connect more people. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies.

“Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”

The exposure of the internal memo comes as Congress has grown increasingly impatient with Facbook’s unwillingness to come clean on how the social media network facilitated online Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election and permitted the collection of personal data on 50 million FB users. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has finally agreed to testify before a congressional committee, probably sometime in April.

The internal memo is titled “The Ugly,” and has not been previously circulated outside the Silicon Valley social media giant that has 2 billion users and a value of $450 billion. Bosworth, a 12-year veteran at Facebook, wrote the memo to FB employees one day after the shooting death of a Chicago man was captured on Facebook Live, the company’s livestreaming product.

A trio of reporters working on the Buzzfeed story wrote this:

The Bosworth memo reveals the extent to which Facebook’s leadership understood the physical and social risks the platform’s products carried — even as the company downplayed those risks in public. It suggests that senior executives had deep qualms about conduct that they are now seeking to defend. And as the company reels amid a scandal over improper outside data collection on its users, the memo shows that one senior executive — one of Zuckerberg’s longest-serving deputies — prioritized all-encompassing growth over all else, a view that has led to questionable data collection and manipulative treatment of its users.

Below is a post I published a few days ago about a frequent Facebook critic who recognized two decades ago the sneaky ways FB could be manipulated in the political world to influence U.S. elections.

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As Google, Twitter and especially Facebook come under intense, bipartisan criticism from Congress again over their passive approach toward online trolls and “fake news” sites in the presidential election, a frequent Facebook commentator from Macomb County warned about such shenanigans back in 2015 and beyond.

Writing under the pen name Malcolm McEasy, this critic predicted that online data mining, which was still not well understood prior to the 2016 election, could be used to steal or buy personal information on millions of voters and manipulate their choices at the ballot box. McEasy had first glimpsed the beginnings of this unstable future three decades ago.

With the revelations of recent months – widespread Russian meddling in the election, manipulations of Facebook designed to alter the election outcome, and allegedly unethical use of data mining by the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm – it seems that McEasy should be taking a bow, if not shouting out a “Told you so” rant.

To be clear, McEasy, a 40-year veteran of the computer industry, is no Hillary Clinton fan who believes she rightfully deserved the presidency. After years of criticizing various local politicians on Facebook, McEasy came out of the shadows in June 2015, posting a photo of himself that was easily recognized by most political activists in his home base of Sterling Heights, Michigan’s fourth-largest city. In conjunction with that reveal, he warned that unsavory social media maneuvers by political strategists could send American politics down a dark path.

Here is what he wrote at the time:

Every time you click on a web link, every time you post on social media, every time you make a comment on a newspaper’s website, that data is added to your profile.
It gets even worse: Using the comments you make on social media, it is possible to develop a fairly accurate profile of your entire life: what you believe, what you support, what you oppose, what ‘dangerous’ ideas you have.

… Already, for example, political groups have created databases of individual voters for entire states which use the information collected to better convince you to vote for their candidate.

Three years later, these shadowy groups can compile detailed information all the way down to individual voting precincts – or even individual voters. That data is used to “push peoples buttons” and shove them fervently into one column (or the other) at election time.

The political world is just catching up to corporate America’s microtargeting, which uses data about each person’s shopping habits and purchases to bombard them with targeted online advertisements that tell them what to think, what to buy.

McEasy

But the British data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica may represent a big step into sleazy politics. Nearly $12 million was paid by the Trump campaign and a related anti-Clinton PAC to Cambridge Analytica for advertising and other online messaging during the 2016 campaign. The firm was co-created by former Trump acolyte Steve Bannon and financed by pro-Trump billionaire Robert Mercer. Their work was made possible by acquiring data on 50 million Facebook users.

Legal questions are piling up about the acquisition of that Facebook info. And investigations are gearing up in the U.S. and the UK as the company this week suspended its CEO, Alexander Nix, over comments he made to undercover British reporters who were acting on news tips from a Cambridge whistleblower.

Nix boasted that his firm handled almost everything in the digital campaign waged to elect Trump. He claimed it was responsible for all of the data, research, analytics and targeting, plus the online and television campaigns. “Our data informed all the strategy,” he said.

These revelations only serve to reinforce the alleged impact of foreign influences in the 2016 election, from Russia to Macedonia, as computer hacking and trolling tactics have spelled out a global game of subtle mind control targeted at U.S. and European voters.

Facebook, Twitter and Google executives have set themselves up for another grilling before Congress in the coming days due to their trickle of transparency, a drip-drip-drip approach toward opening the floodgates on all the ugly, unethical online political attacks of the 2016 election.

While social media companies may feign outrage over how the data they sell is used, they were happy to do so in recent years when these transactions were supplying them with billions of dollars.

McEasy, who runs the Facebook site known as the Sterling Heights Local Politics page, sees both parties as equally culpable in abusing data to target campaign messages. In 2012, he noted, the Obama re-election committee broke new ground by compiling massive databases about potential Obama voters.

In an email exchange with me on Monday, McEasy wrote:

In the modern society, people are nothing more than a commodity. To the corporation they are sales, to the politician they are votes, to the media they are simply viewers or props that can be hauled out and displayed to prove their conclusions.

And because of this, a symbiotic relationship exists between every major spoke of society.  The social media platforms provide detailed data. The politicians use this data to mold their message and to target messages down to individual users. The corporation uses this information to increase their sales, and then money is fed back into social media via advertising and research to increase the supply of data. It is a relationship in which every part gains value and makes money; except perhaps the individual.

What’s different now is the quantity of data that is available, and the ability of computers to collate and cross-reference the data at an amazing speed and accuracy.

As technology expands, personal privacy contracts. Cyber-security attempts at protecting privacy, such as fingerprint software and facial recognition technology, have backfired, providing new databases for hackers to target. As for Facebook, it is probably safe from a collapse due to users abandoning the massive social media platform.

“So, in the end, social media companies have every reason in the world to sell their valuable user data, and political parties and corporations have every reason in the world to buy the data,” McEasy said. “And since both sides of this relationship win, no one wants to stop it, except maybe the user whose life is for sale to the highest bidder.

With every mouse click, we are all contributing to our own manipulation — and the denigration of democracy.