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Its purely Trump hatred driving this. Because Obama doing this in 2012 = Genius. Trump doing this in 2016 = Scandal. I'm a libertarian and yes I threw my vo

Its purely Trump hatred driving this. Because Obama doing this in 2012 = Genius. Trump doing this in 2016 = Scandal. I'm a libertarian and yes I threw my vote away on Gary Johnson, but looking at the media landscape, there truly is a backlash against conservatives going on in social media, and this is just part of that. Donald Trump won because fake news... no wait, it was Russia and their abysmal social media spending... no wait, its because he gamed facebook! They want to put more pressure on facebook to "do something about this" now that the coin has flipped. I have a feeling though this is going to get out of hand and drag facebook into the gutter.

wyldfire 9y ago
I suppose Trump hatred plays a role. But superpowers interfering with elections is a big deal, it's the kind of thing that could lead to another extinction level event. Any of the mechanisms leveraged in this propaganda campaign should receive extra scrutiny.
- ensignavenger 9y ago
  "superpowers interfering with elections is a big deal" Which has been going on since... forever? (at least, since elections and superpowers have been a thing, anyway)
  - ianamartin 9y ago
    It's only a big deal when it's not us or our allies doing it.
matchbok 9y ago
What Obama did was very, very different. The fact that you don't know this (or ignored it) tells a lot about how biased you are. And yes, there should be backlash against conservatives. They just elected a Nazi in Illinois.
- take4 9y ago
  > They just elected a Nazi in Illinois If you're talking about Arthur Jones, you're being very misleading. He won the Republican primary, but it was unopposed, in a heavily democratic district, and he was already denounced by Illinois Republicans.
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    If they were serious about denouncing him, why not put up an opposing candidate?
    - take4 9y ago
      I don't know, but I imagine nobody else wanted to spend money, time, or risk their reputation on an election they have almost no chance to win.
- RyanZAG 9y ago
  > They just elected a Nazi in Illinois. I know nothing about American politics or what's going on in Illinois. But that you jump straight on calling someone you disagree with a "Nazi", while also saying how different what Obama did with no explanation and a lot of insults, does not give me much confidence in what you are saying here. Just letting you know in case you were trying to convince anyone of your viewpoint.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    No, a literal former leader of the American Nazi Party party ran in an uncontested GOP primary and so will be a candidate in an upcoming election (he will lose, any GOP candidate would lose that particular election). No one is being called a Nazi for the wrong reasons. I guess the local party would have been smart to put someone else on the ballot, just for the look of things. Really that's the problem with the comment, characterizing the failure of the party to stand up someone respectable as support for the Nazi.
  - apocolyps6 9y ago
chasing 9y ago
Obama's campaign didn't do what Cambridge Analytica is accused of doing.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- aylmao 9y ago
  It didn't do what _Cambridge Analytica_ is accused of doing, but it did do what a lot of people are freaked out Facebook can do; namely provide third parties with detailed user information. Using this information in 2012 was lauded as a great idea that helped drive Obama to success. _Cambridge Analytica_ did it in a more slezy way that violated Facebook's Terms of Use-- they lied to Facebook in terms of what the data was used for and the fact they were harvesting it to form a database. Yet Facebook is not painted as a victim here, because now the idea of using your "likes" to target ads is not applauded, its frowned upon. And yes, Obama also did the whole whole "friends who didn't explicitly use the app" thing (which has since been disabled from Facebook's APIs, I think since v2.0 in 4/30/2014): > The campaign boasted that more than a million people downloaded the app, which, given an average friend-list size of 190, means that as many as 190 million had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent.[1] [1]: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-scandal-trump-election-obama-2012/ https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...
  - dspillett 9y ago
    > Yet Facebook is not painted as a victim here, They failed to disclose the issue (which they knew about for quite some time) and in fact continued to profit form the relationship with CA. I don't seen a reasonable expectation that they should be considered a victim.
    - aylmao 9y ago
      I actually agree with you, this could be handled better by them. I'm personally a little confused by the details and timings though; where did you read about them profiting after they knew about the issue?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wybiral 9y ago
I think it's more that all of these things are gaining traction and people are trying to relate it to Trump. There's been a growing discussion about data collection and shady advertising practices for a long time. It's not about Trump. And this isn't the first time I've seen distrust raised towards Facebook or Google about this stuff. The Russian propaganda was mostly divisive messages surrounding things like race / guns. People keep trying to make it about Trump but investigators have been saying that it's more broad the whole time. Regardless of him it's still something we need to investigate. Anything that seems scandalous or sketchy will probably be tied to Trump by people who don't like him if possible. But the same behavior has been going on for longer than Trump (people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff, and don't even get started on what people were accusing the Clinton campaign of). It shouldn't distract from the fact that it's scandalous and sketchy and we should keep an eye on these issues. PS: Get ready to see everything being related back to Trump. All actions of government, law, etc. The positive and the negative. Because that's how this always works. The current administration gets more credit for change than they deserve.
- mike10010100 9y ago
  > (people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff, and don't even get started on what people were accusing the Clinton campaign of). It shouldn't distract from the fact that it's scandalous and sketchy and we should keep an eye on these issues. Accusations are one thing. We have actual documented evidence here, and that's what so startling. In addition, I'd argue that if Trump wasn't such an incompetent, bumbling, authoritarian moron, the backlash absolutely wouldn't have been as bad. But the fact of the matter is that this is absolutely something new. Unless you're trying to suggest that both Obama and Clinton engaged companies who had a history of generating fake news, emotionally charged propaganda, and outright honeypotting political opponents with hookers and blackmail. That's what makes this different. I'm absolutely flabberghasted that this point isn't being driven harder, instead defaulting to "well both sides...". It's false equivalency, pure and simple.
  - wybiral 9y ago
    I don't think you got what I was saying. All of these things are alarming, yes. But not because Trump is involved. These issues should be investigated regardless of who was doing it. And I was trying to convey to the parent post that these issues of data use and disingenuous campaign practices would have come up, Trump or not, because it's happening and we don't like it as a society. But since Trump is the one, right now, people will point the finger at him like he's to blame for it all. That's why I mentioned Obama (because people did the same to him). It looks, to me, like Trump sought help from shady people in multiple cases. And that's worth noting but it's irrelevant to the fact that those people were doing shady things in the first place. > We have actual documented evidence here, and that's what so startling. No. Sadly we only have a situation where an app was collecting data using Facebook and a video where two individuals were pitching their product by saying things to try and win a customer. We know that the Trump campaign hired them, but we don't know that the Trump campaign knew about their data practices any more than their other customers knew. They had many other customers before Trump. PS: I'm not a Republican and am not supporting Donald Trump. But trying to spin this as real evidence is stooping to their level of misinformation. We don't know that the Trump campaign knew about this. And we don't know that the recent videos weren't just CA lying to sell their product. But yes we absolutely need to investigate both of those possibilities.
fzeroracer 9y ago
What Obama did is not nearly the same as what Trump did [1]. Also, it's important to keep in mind that this entire argument about Obama is one diversion perpetuated by Cambridge Analytica. They brought up this idea and it has been bouncing around the more surreptitious parts of the internet as a tactic to avoid criticism. I wonder why a place like CA would attempt to change the conversation? [1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-employ-the-same-strategies-as-cambridge-analytica/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...
- noetic_techy 9y ago
  They leave out a critical fact, which you can find buried in The Hill article they deride: " “Consciously or otherwise,” The Guardian states, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page — home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends — directly into the central Obama database.” Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. " Consciously or otherwise... It was the same exact tactic, maybe only slightly less deceptive than CA's methods.
anarchy8 9y ago
Please don't spread lies. What the Obama campaign was doing in 2012 was nothing compared to what Cambridge Analytica did for Trump.
- yters 9y ago
  What did Obama's campaign do? I remember a lot of news when he was elected praising his revolutionary social network mining team that got out the youth vote. How is this different than what Cambridge Analytica did?
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > What did Obama's campaign do? I remember a lot of news when he was elected praising his revolutionary social network mining team that got out the youth vote. How is this different than what Cambridge Analytica did? The Obama campaign engagement was overt, users knew they were connecting to a political campaign and whose, and the entity with API access didn't transfer the data for radically different uses than the overt ones to a third party.
  - mike10010100 9y ago
    >How is this different than what Cambridge Analytica did? The other company didn't spread fake news, conduct honeypot blackmailing schemes, and wasn't funded by one of America's largest geopolitical foes.
- CptJamesCook 9y ago
  https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-f... Director of the Obama campaign seems to feel they did very similar things, with the tacit support of Facebook (at least after the fact)
chasing 9y ago
> Its purely Trump hatred driving this. I would agree that the election of someone so woefully unfit to serve has scared the shit out of a lot of people. And so many people are putting a lot of thought and energy into trying to pick apart how things could've gone so wrong. Thus, we're having discussions like these. We tend to question things more after they go wrong. Whether or not you liked his policies, Obama was a fairly straightforward politician who at least knew how to operate the office of the Presidency and wasn't nested in an extensive web of shadiness and criminality.
alwayseasy 9y ago
Obama didn't use an entire fake news infrastructure coupled with hackers leaking the opposition's emails... Your equivalency is misguided or misleading, you can't compare Obama 2012 to Trump 2016. You present the topics as separate when they are all linked. The damage comes from data + fake news + Russian APT.
- mike10010100 9y ago
  This. There's a lot of false equivalence going on in this thread.
wyldfire 9y ago
I'm not sure how authoritative it is but this tweet [1] claims otherwise. [1] https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953

wyldfire 9y ago

I suppose Trump hatred plays a role. But superpowers interfering with elections is a big deal, it's the kind of thing that could lead to another extinction level event. Any of the mechanisms leveraged in this propaganda campaign should receive extra scrutiny.

ensignavenger 9y ago
"superpowers interfering with elections is a big deal" Which has been going on since... forever? (at least, since elections and superpowers have been a thing, anyway)
- ianamartin 9y ago
  It's only a big deal when it's not us or our allies doing it.

matchbok 9y ago

What Obama did was very, very different. The fact that you don't know this (or ignored it) tells a lot about how biased you are. And yes, there should be backlash against conservatives. They just elected a Nazi in Illinois.

take4 9y ago
> They just elected a Nazi in Illinois If you're talking about Arthur Jones, you're being very misleading. He won the Republican primary, but it was unopposed, in a heavily democratic district, and he was already denounced by Illinois Republicans.
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  If they were serious about denouncing him, why not put up an opposing candidate?
  - take4 9y ago
    I don't know, but I imagine nobody else wanted to spend money, time, or risk their reputation on an election they have almost no chance to win.
RyanZAG 9y ago
> They just elected a Nazi in Illinois. I know nothing about American politics or what's going on in Illinois. But that you jump straight on calling someone you disagree with a "Nazi", while also saying how different what Obama did with no explanation and a lot of insults, does not give me much confidence in what you are saying here. Just letting you know in case you were trying to convince anyone of your viewpoint.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  No, a literal former leader of the American Nazi Party party ran in an uncontested GOP primary and so will be a candidate in an upcoming election (he will lose, any GOP candidate would lose that particular election). No one is being called a Nazi for the wrong reasons. I guess the local party would have been smart to put someone else on the ballot, just for the look of things. Really that's the problem with the comment, characterizing the failure of the party to stand up someone respectable as support for the Nazi.
- apocolyps6 9y ago

chasing 9y ago

Obama's campaign didn't do what Cambridge Analytica is accused of doing.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aylmao 9y ago
It didn't do what _Cambridge Analytica_ is accused of doing, but it did do what a lot of people are freaked out Facebook can do; namely provide third parties with detailed user information. Using this information in 2012 was lauded as a great idea that helped drive Obama to success. _Cambridge Analytica_ did it in a more slezy way that violated Facebook's Terms of Use-- they lied to Facebook in terms of what the data was used for and the fact they were harvesting it to form a database. Yet Facebook is not painted as a victim here, because now the idea of using your "likes" to target ads is not applauded, its frowned upon. And yes, Obama also did the whole whole "friends who didn't explicitly use the app" thing (which has since been disabled from Facebook's APIs, I think since v2.0 in 4/30/2014): > The campaign boasted that more than a million people downloaded the app, which, given an average friend-list size of 190, means that as many as 190 million had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent.[1] [1]: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-scandal-trump-election-obama-2012/ https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...
- dspillett 9y ago
  > Yet Facebook is not painted as a victim here, They failed to disclose the issue (which they knew about for quite some time) and in fact continued to profit form the relationship with CA. I don't seen a reasonable expectation that they should be considered a victim.
  - aylmao 9y ago
    I actually agree with you, this could be handled better by them. I'm personally a little confused by the details and timings though; where did you read about them profiting after they knew about the issue?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wybiral 9y ago

I think it's more that all of these things are gaining traction and people are trying to relate it to Trump. There's been a growing discussion about data collection and shady advertising practices for a long time. It's not about Trump. And this isn't the first time I've seen distrust raised towards Facebook or Google about this stuff. The Russian propaganda was mostly divisive messages surrounding things like race / guns. People keep trying to make it about Trump but investigators have been saying that it's more broad the whole time. Regardless of him it's still something we need to investigate. Anything that seems scandalous or sketchy will probably be tied to Trump by people who don't like him if possible. But the same behavior has been going on for longer than Trump (people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff, and don't even get started on what people were accusing the Clinton campaign of). It shouldn't distract from the fact that it's scandalous and sketchy and we should keep an eye on these issues. PS: Get ready to see everything being related back to Trump. All actions of government, law, etc. The positive and the negative. Because that's how this always works. The current administration gets more credit for change than they deserve.

mike10010100 9y ago
> (people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff, and don't even get started on what people were accusing the Clinton campaign of). It shouldn't distract from the fact that it's scandalous and sketchy and we should keep an eye on these issues. Accusations are one thing. We have actual documented evidence here, and that's what so startling. In addition, I'd argue that if Trump wasn't such an incompetent, bumbling, authoritarian moron, the backlash absolutely wouldn't have been as bad. But the fact of the matter is that this is absolutely something new. Unless you're trying to suggest that both Obama and Clinton engaged companies who had a history of generating fake news, emotionally charged propaganda, and outright honeypotting political opponents with hookers and blackmail. That's what makes this different. I'm absolutely flabberghasted that this point isn't being driven harder, instead defaulting to "well both sides...". It's false equivalency, pure and simple.
- wybiral 9y ago
  I don't think you got what I was saying. All of these things are alarming, yes. But not because Trump is involved. These issues should be investigated regardless of who was doing it. And I was trying to convey to the parent post that these issues of data use and disingenuous campaign practices would have come up, Trump or not, because it's happening and we don't like it as a society. But since Trump is the one, right now, people will point the finger at him like he's to blame for it all. That's why I mentioned Obama (because people did the same to him). It looks, to me, like Trump sought help from shady people in multiple cases. And that's worth noting but it's irrelevant to the fact that those people were doing shady things in the first place. > We have actual documented evidence here, and that's what so startling. No. Sadly we only have a situation where an app was collecting data using Facebook and a video where two individuals were pitching their product by saying things to try and win a customer. We know that the Trump campaign hired them, but we don't know that the Trump campaign knew about their data practices any more than their other customers knew. They had many other customers before Trump. PS: I'm not a Republican and am not supporting Donald Trump. But trying to spin this as real evidence is stooping to their level of misinformation. We don't know that the Trump campaign knew about this. And we don't know that the recent videos weren't just CA lying to sell their product. But yes we absolutely need to investigate both of those possibilities.

fzeroracer 9y ago

What Obama did is not nearly the same as what Trump did [1]. Also, it's important to keep in mind that this entire argument about Obama is one diversion perpetuated by Cambridge Analytica. They brought up this idea and it has been bouncing around the more surreptitious parts of the internet as a tactic to avoid criticism. I wonder why a place like CA would attempt to change the conversation? [1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-employ-the-same-strategies-as-cambridge-analytica/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...

noetic_techy 9y ago
They leave out a critical fact, which you can find buried in The Hill article they deride: " “Consciously or otherwise,” The Guardian states, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page — home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends — directly into the central Obama database.” Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. " Consciously or otherwise... It was the same exact tactic, maybe only slightly less deceptive than CA's methods.

anarchy8 9y ago

Please don't spread lies. What the Obama campaign was doing in 2012 was nothing compared to what Cambridge Analytica did for Trump.

yters 9y ago
What did Obama's campaign do? I remember a lot of news when he was elected praising his revolutionary social network mining team that got out the youth vote. How is this different than what Cambridge Analytica did?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > What did Obama's campaign do? I remember a lot of news when he was elected praising his revolutionary social network mining team that got out the youth vote. How is this different than what Cambridge Analytica did? The Obama campaign engagement was overt, users knew they were connecting to a political campaign and whose, and the entity with API access didn't transfer the data for radically different uses than the overt ones to a third party.
- mike10010100 9y ago
  >How is this different than what Cambridge Analytica did? The other company didn't spread fake news, conduct honeypot blackmailing schemes, and wasn't funded by one of America's largest geopolitical foes.
CptJamesCook 9y ago
https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-f... Director of the Obama campaign seems to feel they did very similar things, with the tacit support of Facebook (at least after the fact)

chasing 9y ago

> Its purely Trump hatred driving this. I would agree that the election of someone so woefully unfit to serve has scared the shit out of a lot of people. And so many people are putting a lot of thought and energy into trying to pick apart how things could've gone so wrong. Thus, we're having discussions like these. We tend to question things more after they go wrong. Whether or not you liked his policies, Obama was a fairly straightforward politician who at least knew how to operate the office of the Presidency and wasn't nested in an extensive web of shadiness and criminality.

alwayseasy 9y ago

Obama didn't use an entire fake news infrastructure coupled with hackers leaking the opposition's emails... Your equivalency is misguided or misleading, you can't compare Obama 2012 to Trump 2016. You present the topics as separate when they are all linked. The damage comes from data + fake news + Russian APT.

mike10010100 9y ago
This. There's a lot of false equivalence going on in this thread.

wyldfire 9y ago

I'm not sure how authoritative it is but this tweet [1] claims otherwise. [1] https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953 https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953