Josh Levy raised some serious questions yesterday in a techPresident piece about Obama’s preferred treatment in the launch of Facebook’s new Platform application, which lets users build tools for the Facebook community:
But when Platform launched, Obama was the only candidate with an application. Why didn’t John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Ron Paul, or anyone else get in on the possibility of reaching 20 million or more Facebook users and potential voters?
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The other campaigns found out about Platform with the rest of us, on Friday, May 25. If Facebook let the Obama campaign in but kept all of the other campaigns out, this was a serious breach of trust.
Serious breach of trust, or maybe even an FEC violation? This is the first election cycle in which campaigns are depending on such a huge variety of Internet companies for exposure: YouTube, Google, MySpace, Facebook, Meetup, Eventful, etc etc. These corporations have a tremendous social responsibility, and if they don’t live up to it, they may face some real consequences — and not just in the court of public opinion.
– cpd
Chris Hughes, is one of the early partners of Zuckerberg in his Facebook venture. He’s currently the online coordinator for Obama. This likely has something to do with it…connections with Facebook’s management to get Obama’s application featured prominently in their application directory, not to mention early access for development, testing, and launch of their Obama app really early on in the game.