Well, hello there and welcome. We have many things to discuss today. Among them, Facebook

under fire, Democrats attacking a children's book for no reason at all, and will technology

kill us all? I'm Ben Shapiro. This is the Ben Shapiro show.

Okay, so I'm going to do this. I never do this, but I'm going to take just one moment

event, because let me tell you, the last 24 hours, they've been garbaggio. Now, listen, I'm going to do this. I never do this, but I'm going to take just one moment to vent. Because let me tell you, the last 24 hours, they've been garbaggio.

Now, listen, I'm perfectly well happy to be here in Pennsylvania. I'm speaking at Susquehanna University tonight. They're supposed to be protesters. People are very upset that I'm coming, yada yada, that's how it always goes. But last night I had to fly into Atlanta. I know first world problems. I get in there, then in the middle of a tornado warning,

and then I have to stop at Atlanta. I know first world problems. I get in there, then in the middle of a tornado warning,

and then I have to stop at a hotel that, let's just say, was not five star. It's the kind of hotel where you wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning, and you really haven't gone to sleep, and you're just feeling like garbage, and you need some water because there's no water in the room, because the last time anybody cleaned the room was three years ago,

until you saunter on over to that special vending machine just down the hall, you know, right past those three doors that people have been slamming the entire night. And you know that the guy next door has been listening to a gym, watching a Jim Carrey movie because you can hear through the paper thin walls. Anyway, you saunter on over to that vending machine and you say, you know what, I'll get myself some water and really chill out. And then you get to the vending machine and you realize the only options are Coca-Cola, Sprite, and mellow yellow. And you think to yourself, did I somehow stumble into a portal to hell? And then, of course, we have the technological problems at today shows. But don't worry. We have so many things to get to.

Actual real news, not just me bitting and moaning about the situation. Let's just say that the high life is not always what it's cracked up to me. But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at PolicyGenius. So if you are like me and you are afraid of death at this point in your life, then you might want to be

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that they had illicitly gathered 50 million Facebook users.

Now, there is nothing illegal about what they did, apparently.

What they did is they gathered a bunch of data from Facebook users who had taken a personality quiz,

and then they'd use those personality quiz.

They'd obtained that data. They'd cross-referenced that personality quiz data with supposed politics. And this was a work of heartrending genius, right? This is what won Trump the election. It didn't win Trump the election, by the way. Trump won the election because Hillary was an unbelievably crappy candidate, and Trump campaigned in the right places. Okay, it wasn't because a bunch of people at Cambridge Analytica hacking your Facebook data or anything like this. This is just nonsense. If you've played Farmville on Facebook, they're gathering your information. If you shop online, they're gathering your information. You ever wonder how it is that the ads on your Google are tailored to you, right? You just bought something from Amazon and voila. There's another ad from Amazon. That's because everybody online is always gathering information about you to make sure that they can sell you things. That's how online works. There's nothing terrible that happens so far as I can see yet. Maybe there will be new evidence of something quite terrible, but the left is going crazy because, again, they're trying to set up a particular narrative here. So a spokesman for the FTC is saying, quote, we are aware of the issues that have been raised but cannot comment on whether we are investigating. We take any allegations of violations of our consent decrees very seriously, as we did in 2012 in a privacy case involving Google. Facebook said Tuesday it had received a letter from the FTC with questions but had not been informed of a formal probe. if these were all found to be violations, if it turns out that Facebook had been willfully violating its own consent decree, it would cost them $40,000 per violation. If you were talking about tens of millions of violations, then you're talking about, presumably, billions and billions of dollars in violations. It would basically bankrupt the company if this ends up being a serious issue. But it really

isn't. Okay, these weekend reports alleged that Facebook users allegedly willingly provided their

data to a psychology quiz app. And then the people who made that quiz app passed the data along to

Cambridge Analytica without the user's knowledge constituting a potential violation. Okay,

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