This week, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Inc., testified before the House of Representative and Senate to answer questions about information Cambridge Analytica gleaned from Facebook users.

The knowledge from this information was supposedly used to target voters in the 2016 election.

During former president Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, a similar strategy using Facebook data was implemented, also, as well as during George Bush’s 2004 campaign.

This gathering of information is not a new technique.

According to academic.oup.com, surveying or gathering information for political campaigns has existed for decades, and in the 1960s and 1970s, it became a fixture of political campaigns.

Most of these early forms of data came from telephone surveys and has evolved along with today’s technology.

Unlike the earlier pollsters, Cambridge Analytica just took information without consent, but who is to say if information in days gone by was not used to aid other groups without the knowledge of the survey participants?

Because surely, after all those telephone conversations, advertisers and others that could have benefited from the information may have, at the very least, tried to get their hands on information that could help them.

With the dawn of social media, sharing and exchanging information is becoming a game-changer in many industries.

It even makes television feel antiquated. Tweets trump TV.

How we receive and disperse information is changing faster than we can manage, and Zuckerberg should have erred on the side of transparency to his Facebook users given that the technology to extract our personal information is out there.

And don’t think for one minute others who are using social media are

not out there trolling.

In times past, retailers could determine their markets by what they sell in their stores.

However, nowadays, when so many are shopping online, it makes since that sales and marketing agencies use social media to gain information.

And when it comes to Cambridge Analytica targeting certain political groups, shame on us for believing everything we see and read on social media.

It is no one’s fault but our own if we simply rely on being spoon-fed information.

Trump can get away with his term “fake news” because, unfortunately, there is fake news out there. As a nation, it is time we step up our game and start to become more proactive in searching out the truth.

If we see something on Facebook, whether it supports or attacks our political view, search further to determine if what is being said is fact of fiction.

And this may be a novelty. Try listening to both conservative and liberal views, truth can sometimes fall somewhere in the middle.

Social media is going nowhere anytime soon, so it makes sense for us to refrain from disclosing everything personal about ourselves.

A word to the wise, most folks could care less about our lives, but those looking for information will gladly snatch it up.

Terri Cowart Frazier is a staff writer for The Vicksburg Post. You may reach her at terri.frazier@vicksburgpost.com.