Washington Free Beacon contributing editor Daniel Halper said Friday that most of the current outrage directed at Facebook has been about "political expediency" as opposed to purely being about concerns over consumer data privacy.
Halper was speaking with Fox News' Leland Vittert on Friday as they talked about the effects of Facebook selling consumer data to analytics company Cambridge Analytica.
"How much of this outrage you think stems from the political consequences versus the goodness of politicians who want to protect all of us from big tech?" Vittert asked.
"I think most of this current outrage is for that reason exactly, is political expediency," Halper said. "I think a lot of people, especially on the political left, have been searching desperately to try to explain the election of Donald Trump. They don't know how Donald Trump got elected and here they have apparently found another reason: 'Well, it's Facebook.' Facebook was giving unfettered access to this Cambridge Analytica which was then targeting people with ads, and that must be how Donald Trump won."
Halper, citing reporting from outlets like Mother Jones, argued the ads did not "really have any effect" on the election and there were many who didn't "fall for" the company's proposed value.
"There's been great articles, particularly one in Mother Jones, showing that Cambridge Analytica basically didn't know what they were doing at all, and they were basically selling bunk to all these campaigns," Halper said. "They tried it with the Ted Cruz campaign. They tried it to the Ben Carson campaign."
"It was pushed on them [the Trump campaign] by donors, and so they felt like they had to use it," he said. "But there's no evidence at all that it actually did work, and I think it's incumbent on people to make the argument that it did work rather than people to disprove a negative."