Facebook: Time to Regulate Now

In the run up to the 2012 presidential elections in the United States, the Guardian newspaper published a story of how the Obama re-election campaign was building a huge database on voters using the power of Facebook. This was thus the first election in world history where Facebook could become a dominant political force. Using data mining techniques, connecting user data with their friends and other profiles, the experts could build an amazingly detailed, micro-focused central database which could then be used to customise electoral messages to individuals and communities. This style of micro-targeting was borrowed from the methods of marketing and advertising campaigns of successful consumer goods companies. This strategy was a phenomenal success. As the Guardian article says, if the 2008 Obama campaign was about pioneering the use of social media, the 2012 campaign was all about data.