8 ms·

I'm struggling to understand why people keep bringing up the Obama comparison. At the start of the 2016 elections everyone, Sanders, Clinton, Jeb!, Trump were d

I'm struggling to understand why people keep bringing up the Obama comparison. At the start of the 2016 elections everyone, Sanders, Clinton, Jeb!, Trump were doing what Obama did in 2012. The outrage isn't soley in the fact that the CA campaign used FB data. 1. CA obtained the data illicitly and tried to cover up the fact they had used it, and downplay how many users they had reached. 2. CA used the data to intentionally spread and optimizing the sharing of bogus news. Comparing the CA scandal to Obama is willfully ignoring these two facts that has led to the current backlash. Society, to the frustration of many of us on this forum, has implicitly decided to trust Facebook with the personal data of millions and has allowed the mass-resale of user data, provided that everyone else plays by the "rules" (for example, you can target me to sell ads, but only as long as you trying to sell me TVs). CA (and transitively, Trump) broke these rules.

xienze 9y ago
https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-di... You have a former Obama campaign staffer saying that what they did raised alarms with Facebook. Hence, what they were doing was not OK by someone’s standard. Plus, the intent of the app is irrelevant. By using it you authorized it to get information on everyone in your friend list, something they’ve since disabled for, wait for it, privacy reasons because it’s not like the people on your friend list were ever asked for _their_ consent during the harvesting process.
- astronautjones 9y ago
  IJR is an extremely biased source
  - drak0n1c 9y ago
    Article by the Washington Post on the same topic for those who may prefer a different flavor of 'biased source': https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...
frostburg 9y ago
It's a damage control talking point, see Wikileaks (which at this point is basically a Russian propaganda mouthpiece) immediately suggesting it.
- jayess 9y ago
  Sorta like making everything you disagree with Russian?
  - bduerst 9y ago
    Julian Assange works for RT [1], which is the Russian state propaganda media [2], or was that a rhetorical question? 1. https://www.rt.com/tags/the-julian-assange-show/ https://www.rt.com/tags/the-julian-assange-show/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Propaganda_claims_and_related_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Propaganda_cla...
    - jayess 9y ago
      That's the entire political discourse these days, isn't it? X had dealing with, or "has connections" to Y, therefore everything Y does can be imputed to X. There's a Russian behind every curtain! They're perhaps the most powerful country on earth! Literally everything (from Bernie to Jill Stein to Trump to the NRA) is Russina backed! ZOMG! I'm guessing you haven't ever read anything about McCarthyism. https://theintercept.com/2017/02/23/the-increasingly-unhinged-russia-rhetoric-comes-from-a-long-standing-u-s-playbook/ https://theintercept.com/2017/02/23/the-increasingly-unhinge...
      - frostburg 9y ago
        No, it's an element of political discourse that is entirely necessary. Given how cheap and effective this sort of tactic is in the current media and information landscape, why would someone interested in destabilizing a country not do it?
        9y ago
colordrops 9y ago
Do you really think most of the outraged public understand the nuanced differences between the two? The reason the public is outraged is because of an engineered campaign by Trump's enemies.
- throwaway5752 9y ago
  They aren't nuanced differences, at all. And a substantial majority of the public can be counted as "Trump's enemies" (whatever that paranoid label may mean) probably because they understand how different 2016 was than any other campaign in the US, ever.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- ravitation 9y ago
  Just wondering... If there are differences, which you concede, then maybe it's those differences and not "an engineered campaign by Trump's enemies" driving the difference in outrage?
- rsynnott 9y ago
  Ah yes, Channel 4, the most implacable enemy of Trump. And that time they did an exposé of how Poundland wasn’t actually cheap, it was due to their vendetta against Poundland, and not at all due to the fact that they do bloody investigative journalism. What would you prefer them to do, in depth investigations into how fuzzy cats are? Generally, in investigative journalism, someone gets hurt. It’s not a conspiracy against poor innocent Trump, just the nature of the beast.
- throwaway82729 9y ago
  Russian trolls are infiltrating HN too?
- mistermann 9y ago
  Do we even have much evidence that the public is outraged?
throwaway5752 9y ago
People are trying so hard to create the false equivalency on this issue, too. Nobody ever did what Trump, Cambridge Analytica (Mercers/Bannon), Russia, Wikileaks/Assange did in coordination (allegedly, for now).
- norikki 9y ago
  What does Wikileaks have to do with Cambridge Analytics? (other than both wanting hillary to lose)
- rdtsc 9y ago
  > Nobody ever did what Trump, Cambridge Analytica (Mercers/Bannon), Russia, Wikileaks/Assange Wait, how did Russia, Assange and Trump coordinate? I keep hearing people talk about it, never seen any clear explanation.
  - throwaway5752 9y ago
    Russian hacked the DNC and Podesta. They coordinated on the content and messaging around cherry picked emails with the Trump campaign, and they were released through Wikileaks as an intermediary. The hacking part is me just repeating the assessment of DHS and CIA, per congressional briefings. The coordination is my suspicion based on known interactions with high level Trump campaign surrogates (Trump Jr, Stone) and Assange. The DNC/Podesta hack attribution is Crowdstrike's. https://www.factcheck.org/2018/02/words-trump-russian-meddling/ https://www.factcheck.org/2018/02/words-trump-russian-meddli... might provide you with more of the information you lack.
    - rdtsc 9y ago
      > assessment of DHS and CIA, per congressional briefings. The Is that Comey's hearing? I remember listening to that. He believed that Russians hacked the DNC but he has not seen any evidence of it and he (the FBI) had no access to the servers. He says it comes from believing Crowdstrike. It seems the only solid peace of evidence comes from this one company. Crowdstrike has made up stuff before. In their report about the war in Ukraine they published a made up number about the losses of artillery units. The Ukrainians publicly called them out on it http://www.mil.gov.ua/news/2017/01/06/informacziya-po-vtrati-u-zs-ukraini-80-gaubicz-d-30%E2%80%9D-ne-vidpovidae-dijsnosti/ http://www.mil.gov.ua/news/2017/01/06/informacziya-po-vtrati... and they were forced to update their report https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/reports/idc-vendor-profile-crowdstrike-2/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/reports/idc-vendor-pro... They put more effort into the zombie soldier from the front page than the content of the report itself. Given the thousands and thousand of hours and all the pages and books written on this topic, they'd be a lot more evidence than just the Crowdstrike's report. > they were released through Wikileaks as an intermediary. Assange denies they came from the Russians or a state actor. He could be lying, Hillary certainly wanted to "drone that guy". But as an organization, if he was speaking on behalf of Wikileaks, they have been pretty factual. They obviously pick what they report on but once they say something I have not seen them blatantly lying. > https://www.factcheck.org/2018/02/words-trump-russian-meddling/ https://www.factcheck.org/2018/02/words-trump-russian-meddli... Thanks for the link! The first part is saw is point out how Trump is contradicting himself. There is a whole sub-reddit (trump vs trump I think) and is basically just that. He is saying contradictory thing about anything, I don't see that as proof of collusion. The timeline re-iterates that the evidence came from Crowdstrike. I'd hope there'd be more evidence than that. Maybe let DHS should take a look those machines. They should be able to find someone interested enough to investigate that. Wonder why they didn't / won't do it I see what you mean by Trump Jr. coordinating with Assange on tweeting a about emails and how Assange wanted Jr to "leak" a tax report from Trump. Yeah that does look shady, agreed. One thing I still don't see is Russians colluding with Trump compared to the volume of news and articles convinced of it: "he looked at him at the G20 summit", "he congratulated him on a bogus election", "he acts like he is subservient to him", "they have a piss tape". Those are fun to listen to and pretty effective, certainly keep people clicking and retweeting, but there needs to be something more solid there I think.
astronautjones 9y ago
yeah, CA was willfully stoking hate in its audience with hateful propaganda, and the Obama campaign literally did not do that. There is no equivalency
- jayess 9y ago
  So the exploitation of massive amounts of personal data from unwilling participants is ok as long as you agree with the person doing it?
  - Khaine 9y ago
    Sadly, that seems to be the case. Cambridge Analytica did far worse than Obama's team. They lied about the purpose of the app to steal social graph data. But fundamentally, the abuse of social graph information is the same. They may have gone to different ends (getting people to vote for obama, vs getting people to not vote for clinton), but they are fundamentally the same types of activity. You can't tell it was appropriate for Obama's social media team to steal the social graph and use that to target people (who did not approve their information being obtained).
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    From the words of the person in charge of this: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997 --- They [Facebook] were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side. --- You just have to be on the right "side" that's all. I wonder if anyone went back and ensure they deleted all the data they harvested, then went back and verified that they didn't lie. And in case they didn't, wonder what the media response would be and how many articles would be written about it.
    - MaysonL 9y ago
      Of course, the same person tweeted immediately after that, replying to the tweet you quote: "I am also 100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side."
SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
Folks bring up the Obama comparison... because... well... its a pretty comparable situation. I'm not so charitable towards the public. I wouldn't place any bets that the striking wave of outrage directed at Facebook right now isn't strictly related to the outcome. In this case, that outcome is Trump in the White-house. Not that that isn't a good reason to be outraged - but I don't think its a very principled reason.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jrs235 9y ago
  Pre-2016 Trump campaign, data was used to reach people and encourage voting. 2016 Trump campaign, data was used to stir up FUD and/or discourage voting.
  - SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
    That's a rather suspiciously self-serving and self-reassuring characterization of each scenario, that I don't think holds up with a bit of intellectual honesty. In either case, similar amounts of personal data was harvested from facebook, for whatever purposes the clients cared to use it for, to predictable results. EDIT: And that's all besides the point - the problem isn't that someone with bad intentions got ahold of data and used in a way they shouldn't have, the problem is people are just getting ahold of data they should not have - period.
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    > 2016 Trump campaign, data was used to stir up FUD and/or discourage voting. How so? Unless they were working with the rest of the media outlets and pushing the "Trump has no chance" / "He will never be the president" story. Do you know of any such campaigns? I mostly see it as a mass media hubris. The same outlets Clinton was expecting to help her ended up undermining the election for her, because, well if Trump only has 1% of winning, why bother putting on the shoes and going out to vote.
jerf 9y ago
Based on the first-hand statements from Obama's campaign manager [1], I don't think we can characterize how they got the data as licit. It was, at the very least, wink-wink-nudge-nudge under the table. Facebook either really did know they could do that and didn't care, or their surprise was genuine, but they didn't stop it. Nor did the campaign have permission from everyone. Nor were they any more subtle as to how they used it. To the extent that there was no deception in the Obama's campaign's usage, it was because there was no communication at all. This is not an improvement! And they got more data from this "no communication at all" than CA did. Yes. Everyone was doing it. I totally agree we have a systematic problem here. But everyone was doing it and we have a systematic problem here works in all directions at once. Trump can't be singled out. In fact, Trump may not even have used the data significantly [2], which makes it even more blatently obvious to the rest of America and the world that it's not a matter of principle, it's all a matter of who did it and whether or not we can tar certain people with it. The question I have, and rather a lot of watching Americans and even the world have, is: Does "Silicon Valley" care about our privacy, no matter who is violating it? Or is "Silicon Valley" only suddenly concerned because the wrong people may tangentially have gotten something out of it, but when the "right people" do it Silicon Valley will do everything in its still-considerable power to cover for them? One answer leads to beginning to recover the respect the public even quite recently had for Silicon Valley, but may require a lot of people in Silicon Valley to admit that, yes, "their guys" have been abusive and some corrective actions may need to be taken. (And for quite a lot of people, not just an ambient "yeah, some other people need to do something but not really me" but you, you dear reader, need to understand that abuses occurred and stop covering for them because they were done by the "right person".) The other answer leads to a world in which this week was merely the warning shot in a war that Silicon Valley is basically structurally doomed to lose [3], no matter how invincible it may feel right now, and proving to the world at large that all their fears about Silicon Valley are completely, 100% justified. Which is it going to be? The hard way that's right in the long term, or the short-term psychologically satisfying answer that leads to doom in the long term? [1]: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760?ref_src... [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-of-cambridge-analytica-data-before-election/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-o... [3]: Vast, vast quantities of Silicon Valley power and money are tied up in the premise that even now only a vanishing fraction of their market power has been exploited, and the best days are still ahead. If America and the world at large (the vast, vast bulk of which is not Silicon Valley liberal!) decide that Silicon Valley is the enemy, then all the stock valuations for things like Google and Facebook will more-or-less turn on a dime from "Companies that have immense growth potential in front of them" to "Companies very likely to be in short-term decline". The stock market carnage and loss in power and prestige that will go with that will be historic. Silicon Valley would be well advised not to play with this fire.
fareesh 9y ago
Assuming it is true, for which I have yet to see any evidence, what is the substance of point #2? I have trouble finding these arguments convincing in light of concrete data. I have looked at examples of the fake news posts on Facebook, as reported by the media. Two of them say that you can tweet or SMS to vote instead of going in person. Is this all it takes to disrupt an American election? I saw two other posts - one for a fake event called miners for Trump, and one that says Hillary Clinton has a low approval rating with military veterans. Is there someone making a serious argument that Hillary voters saw this and changed their minds? Folks were on the fence but this is what pushed them to vote for President Trump? I don't find that believable. The posts are weak and hardly convincing, if at all. There was also an anti Trump march after the election which was attended by a large number of people including Michael Moore, which turned out to be organised by Russians on Facebook. That one was effective but seemed to be aimed at the President. This is the kind of hoax stuff that you used to see in email forwards, and those have been doing the rounds for years. Seeing them on Facebook is not a new phenomenon, it's just a different platform. I find this line of reasoning very sketchy because I have yet to see any content or post that makes a compelling argument based on false facts. If you have seen any such posts I would like to see them. I'm also confused about why CA needed the data they took from Kogan in order to do this. How does one relate to the other? Let's pretend I have Kogans data right here with me and I have a few of these fake posts, what do I do next? Do I start adding some of these folks as friends and start sharing content with them? How did they use the Kogan data exactly? By comparison I think some of the memes and hoaxes that the online Trump groups (mostly young Americans) came up with were quite well made. There was a campaign called #DraftOurDaughters that purposely perpetrated a hoax that Hillary Clinton wanted to draft women to fight wars in the middle East. There were also several campaigns to draw attention to the practice of spirit cooking, which was referenced once or twice in John Podesta's emails. I remember being in a discord voice chat one day in 2016 with a few folks from 4chan's /pol/ board and there was work being done where the emails were being made into pamphlets to pass around at church to reach some of the less tech savvy folks, and older folks who were not on Twitter and didn't know much about Wikileaks. As for point #1, given that nobody consented to their data going to either Obama or Trump I think the comparison is quite valid. CA broke an arbitrary platform policy whereas the Obama campaign got the data with their blessing. I don't think that is a good thing, or that it makes their use of people's personal data acceptable.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
1. CA obtained the data illicitly and tried to cover up the fact they had used it, and downplay how many users they had reached. At the end of the day in both cases, the analytics group (CA or Obama for America) obtained the data of millions of users that did not directly and explicitly authorize their data to be analyzed. ~50M in the case of CA and ~180M in the case of OFA. Neither CA nor OFA broke any statues or laws, they both worked around loopholes and tricks in Facebook's TOS & API. 2. CA used the data to intentionally spread and optimizing the sharing of bogus news. I haven't yet heard this exact argument made for why this specific case was bad, though I suspect it's implied, but it seems like that is just a piece of the problem. Interestingly however, the contents of the targeted ads seems immaterial to the most important argument which is that this was a "breach" of private user data - a completely separate argument. Your last point I think sums it up well, Trump and his cronies used the system against itself and people don't like it. Full stop. It wasn't the fact that he used it, because others did, it was the fact that he used it in a way that we didn't expect or like (not that it broke laws). I mean say what you will but it truly embodies the hacker ethos.
ucaetano 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

xienze 9y ago

https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ https://ijr.com/ijr-red/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-di... You have a former Obama campaign staffer saying that what they did raised alarms with Facebook. Hence, what they were doing was not OK by someone’s standard. Plus, the intent of the app is irrelevant. By using it you authorized it to get information on everyone in your friend list, something they’ve since disabled for, wait for it, privacy reasons because it’s not like the people on your friend list were ever asked for _their_ consent during the harvesting process.

astronautjones 9y ago
IJR is an extremely biased source
- drak0n1c 9y ago
  Article by the Washington Post on the same topic for those who may prefer a different flavor of 'biased source': https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...

frostburg 9y ago

It's a damage control talking point, see Wikileaks (which at this point is basically a Russian propaganda mouthpiece) immediately suggesting it.

jayess 9y ago
Sorta like making everything you disagree with Russian?
- bduerst 9y ago
  Julian Assange works for RT [1], which is the Russian state propaganda media [2], or was that a rhetorical question? 1. https://www.rt.com/tags/the-julian-assange-show/ https://www.rt.com/tags/the-julian-assange-show/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Propaganda_claims_and_related_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Propaganda_cla...
  - jayess 9y ago
    That's the entire political discourse these days, isn't it? X had dealing with, or "has connections" to Y, therefore everything Y does can be imputed to X. There's a Russian behind every curtain! They're perhaps the most powerful country on earth! Literally everything (from Bernie to Jill Stein to Trump to the NRA) is Russina backed! ZOMG! I'm guessing you haven't ever read anything about McCarthyism. https://theintercept.com/2017/02/23/the-increasingly-unhinged-russia-rhetoric-comes-from-a-long-standing-u-s-playbook/ https://theintercept.com/2017/02/23/the-increasingly-unhinge...
    - frostburg 9y ago
      No, it's an element of political discourse that is entirely necessary. Given how cheap and effective this sort of tactic is in the current media and information landscape, why would someone interested in destabilizing a country not do it?
      - 9y ago

colordrops 9y ago

Do you really think most of the outraged public understand the nuanced differences between the two? The reason the public is outraged is because of an engineered campaign by Trump's enemies.

throwaway5752 9y ago
They aren't nuanced differences, at all. And a substantial majority of the public can be counted as "Trump's enemies" (whatever that paranoid label may mean) probably because they understand how different 2016 was than any other campaign in the US, ever.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ravitation 9y ago
Just wondering... If there are differences, which you concede, then maybe it's those differences and not "an engineered campaign by Trump's enemies" driving the difference in outrage?
rsynnott 9y ago
Ah yes, Channel 4, the most implacable enemy of Trump. And that time they did an exposé of how Poundland wasn’t actually cheap, it was due to their vendetta against Poundland, and not at all due to the fact that they do bloody investigative journalism. What would you prefer them to do, in depth investigations into how fuzzy cats are? Generally, in investigative journalism, someone gets hurt. It’s not a conspiracy against poor innocent Trump, just the nature of the beast.
throwaway82729 9y ago
Russian trolls are infiltrating HN too?
mistermann 9y ago
Do we even have much evidence that the public is outraged?

throwaway5752 9y ago

People are trying so hard to create the false equivalency on this issue, too. Nobody ever did what Trump, Cambridge Analytica (Mercers/Bannon), Russia, Wikileaks/Assange did in coordination (allegedly, for now).

norikki 9y ago
What does Wikileaks have to do with Cambridge Analytics? (other than both wanting hillary to lose)
rdtsc 9y ago
> Nobody ever did what Trump, Cambridge Analytica (Mercers/Bannon), Russia, Wikileaks/Assange Wait, how did Russia, Assange and Trump coordinate? I keep hearing people talk about it, never seen any clear explanation.
- throwaway5752 9y ago
  Russian hacked the DNC and Podesta. They coordinated on the content and messaging around cherry picked emails with the Trump campaign, and they were released through Wikileaks as an intermediary. The hacking part is me just repeating the assessment of DHS and CIA, per congressional briefings. The coordination is my suspicion based on known interactions with high level Trump campaign surrogates (Trump Jr, Stone) and Assange. The DNC/Podesta hack attribution is Crowdstrike's. https://www.factcheck.org/2018/02/words-trump-russian-meddling/ https://www.factcheck.org/2018/02/words-trump-russian-meddli... might provide you with more of the information you lack.
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    > assessment of DHS and CIA, per congressional briefings. The Is that Comey's hearing? I remember listening to that. He believed that Russians hacked the DNC but he has not seen any evidence of it and he (the FBI) had no access to the servers. He says it comes from believing Crowdstrike. It seems the only solid peace of evidence comes from this one company. Crowdstrike has made up stuff before. In their report about the war in Ukraine they published a made up number about the losses of artillery units. The Ukrainians publicly called them out on it http://www.mil.gov.ua/news/2017/01/06/informacziya-po-vtrati-u-zs-ukraini-80-gaubicz-d-30%E2%80%9D-ne-vidpovidae-dijsnosti/ http://www.mil.gov.ua/news/2017/01/06/informacziya-po-vtrati... and they were forced to update their report https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/reports/idc-vendor-profile-crowdstrike-2/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/reports/idc-vendor-pro... They put more effort into the zombie soldier from the front page than the content of the report itself. Given the thousands and thousand of hours and all the pages and books written on this topic, they'd be a lot more evidence than just the Crowdstrike's report. > they were released through Wikileaks as an intermediary. Assange denies they came from the Russians or a state actor. He could be lying, Hillary certainly wanted to "drone that guy". But as an organization, if he was speaking on behalf of Wikileaks, they have been pretty factual. They obviously pick what they report on but once they say something I have not seen them blatantly lying. > https://www.factcheck.org/2018/02/words-trump-russian-meddling/ https://www.factcheck.org/2018/02/words-trump-russian-meddli... Thanks for the link! The first part is saw is point out how Trump is contradicting himself. There is a whole sub-reddit (trump vs trump I think) and is basically just that. He is saying contradictory thing about anything, I don't see that as proof of collusion. The timeline re-iterates that the evidence came from Crowdstrike. I'd hope there'd be more evidence than that. Maybe let DHS should take a look those machines. They should be able to find someone interested enough to investigate that. Wonder why they didn't / won't do it I see what you mean by Trump Jr. coordinating with Assange on tweeting a about emails and how Assange wanted Jr to "leak" a tax report from Trump. Yeah that does look shady, agreed. One thing I still don't see is Russians colluding with Trump compared to the volume of news and articles convinced of it: "he looked at him at the G20 summit", "he congratulated him on a bogus election", "he acts like he is subservient to him", "they have a piss tape". Those are fun to listen to and pretty effective, certainly keep people clicking and retweeting, but there needs to be something more solid there I think.

astronautjones 9y ago

yeah, CA was willfully stoking hate in its audience with hateful propaganda, and the Obama campaign literally did not do that. There is no equivalency

jayess 9y ago
So the exploitation of massive amounts of personal data from unwilling participants is ok as long as you agree with the person doing it?
- Khaine 9y ago
  Sadly, that seems to be the case. Cambridge Analytica did far worse than Obama's team. They lied about the purpose of the app to steal social graph data. But fundamentally, the abuse of social graph information is the same. They may have gone to different ends (getting people to vote for obama, vs getting people to not vote for clinton), but they are fundamentally the same types of activity. You can't tell it was appropriate for Obama's social media team to steal the social graph and use that to target people (who did not approve their information being obtained).
- rdtsc 9y ago
  From the words of the person in charge of this: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997 --- They [Facebook] were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side. --- You just have to be on the right "side" that's all. I wonder if anyone went back and ensure they deleted all the data they harvested, then went back and verified that they didn't lie. And in case they didn't, wonder what the media response would be and how many articles would be written about it.
  - MaysonL 9y ago
    Of course, the same person tweeted immediately after that, replying to the tweet you quote: "I am also 100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side."

SmirkingRevenge 9y ago

Folks bring up the Obama comparison... because... well... its a pretty comparable situation. I'm not so charitable towards the public. I wouldn't place any bets that the striking wave of outrage directed at Facebook right now isn't strictly related to the outcome. In this case, that outcome is Trump in the White-house. Not that that isn't a good reason to be outraged - but I don't think its a very principled reason.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jrs235 9y ago
Pre-2016 Trump campaign, data was used to reach people and encourage voting. 2016 Trump campaign, data was used to stir up FUD and/or discourage voting.
- SmirkingRevenge 9y ago
  That's a rather suspiciously self-serving and self-reassuring characterization of each scenario, that I don't think holds up with a bit of intellectual honesty. In either case, similar amounts of personal data was harvested from facebook, for whatever purposes the clients cared to use it for, to predictable results. EDIT: And that's all besides the point - the problem isn't that someone with bad intentions got ahold of data and used in a way they shouldn't have, the problem is people are just getting ahold of data they should not have - period.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  > 2016 Trump campaign, data was used to stir up FUD and/or discourage voting. How so? Unless they were working with the rest of the media outlets and pushing the "Trump has no chance" / "He will never be the president" story. Do you know of any such campaigns? I mostly see it as a mass media hubris. The same outlets Clinton was expecting to help her ended up undermining the election for her, because, well if Trump only has 1% of winning, why bother putting on the shoes and going out to vote.

jerf 9y ago

Based on the first-hand statements from Obama's campaign manager [1], I don't think we can characterize how they got the data as licit. It was, at the very least, wink-wink-nudge-nudge under the table. Facebook either really did know they could do that and didn't care, or their surprise was genuine, but they didn't stop it. Nor did the campaign have permission from everyone. Nor were they any more subtle as to how they used it. To the extent that there was no deception in the Obama's campaign's usage, it was because there was no communication at all. This is not an improvement! And they got more data from this "no communication at all" than CA did. Yes. Everyone was doing it. I totally agree we have a systematic problem here. But everyone was doing it and we have a systematic problem here works in all directions at once. Trump can't be singled out. In fact, Trump may not even have used the data significantly [2], which makes it even more blatently obvious to the rest of America and the world that it's not a matter of principle, it's all a matter of who did it and whether or not we can tar certain people with it. The question I have, and rather a lot of watching Americans and even the world have, is: Does "Silicon Valley" care about our privacy, no matter who is violating it? Or is "Silicon Valley" only suddenly concerned because the wrong people may tangentially have gotten something out of it, but when the "right people" do it Silicon Valley will do everything in its still-considerable power to cover for them? One answer leads to beginning to recover the respect the public even quite recently had for Silicon Valley, but may require a lot of people in Silicon Valley to admit that, yes, "their guys" have been abusive and some corrective actions may need to be taken. (And for quite a lot of people, not just an ambient "yeah, some other people need to do something but not really me" but you, you dear reader, need to understand that abuses occurred and stop covering for them because they were done by the "right person".) The other answer leads to a world in which this week was merely the warning shot in a war that Silicon Valley is basically structurally doomed to lose [3], no matter how invincible it may feel right now, and proving to the world at large that all their fears about Silicon Valley are completely, 100% justified. Which is it going to be? The hard way that's right in the long term, or the short-term psychologically satisfying answer that leads to doom in the long term? [1]: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760?ref_src... [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-of-cambridge-analytica-data-before-election/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-o... [3]: Vast, vast quantities of Silicon Valley power and money are tied up in the premise that even now only a vanishing fraction of their market power has been exploited, and the best days are still ahead. If America and the world at large (the vast, vast bulk of which is not Silicon Valley liberal!) decide that Silicon Valley is the enemy, then all the stock valuations for things like Google and Facebook will more-or-less turn on a dime from "Companies that have immense growth potential in front of them" to "Companies very likely to be in short-term decline". The stock market carnage and loss in power and prestige that will go with that will be historic. Silicon Valley would be well advised not to play with this fire.

fareesh 9y ago

Assuming it is true, for which I have yet to see any evidence, what is the substance of point #2? I have trouble finding these arguments convincing in light of concrete data. I have looked at examples of the fake news posts on Facebook, as reported by the media. Two of them say that you can tweet or SMS to vote instead of going in person. Is this all it takes to disrupt an American election? I saw two other posts - one for a fake event called miners for Trump, and one that says Hillary Clinton has a low approval rating with military veterans. Is there someone making a serious argument that Hillary voters saw this and changed their minds? Folks were on the fence but this is what pushed them to vote for President Trump? I don't find that believable. The posts are weak and hardly convincing, if at all. There was also an anti Trump march after the election which was attended by a large number of people including Michael Moore, which turned out to be organised by Russians on Facebook. That one was effective but seemed to be aimed at the President. This is the kind of hoax stuff that you used to see in email forwards, and those have been doing the rounds for years. Seeing them on Facebook is not a new phenomenon, it's just a different platform. I find this line of reasoning very sketchy because I have yet to see any content or post that makes a compelling argument based on false facts. If you have seen any such posts I would like to see them. I'm also confused about why CA needed the data they took from Kogan in order to do this. How does one relate to the other? Let's pretend I have Kogans data right here with me and I have a few of these fake posts, what do I do next? Do I start adding some of these folks as friends and start sharing content with them? How did they use the Kogan data exactly? By comparison I think some of the memes and hoaxes that the online Trump groups (mostly young Americans) came up with were quite well made. There was a campaign called #DraftOurDaughters that purposely perpetrated a hoax that Hillary Clinton wanted to draft women to fight wars in the middle East. There were also several campaigns to draw attention to the practice of spirit cooking, which was referenced once or twice in John Podesta's emails. I remember being in a discord voice chat one day in 2016 with a few folks from 4chan's /pol/ board and there was work being done where the emails were being made into pamphlets to pass around at church to reach some of the less tech savvy folks, and older folks who were not on Twitter and didn't know much about Wikileaks. As for point #1, given that nobody consented to their data going to either Obama or Trump I think the comparison is quite valid. CA broke an arbitrary platform policy whereas the Obama campaign got the data with their blessing. I don't think that is a good thing, or that it makes their use of people's personal data acceptable.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

1. CA obtained the data illicitly and tried to cover up the fact they had used it, and downplay how many users they had reached. At the end of the day in both cases, the analytics group (CA or Obama for America) obtained the data of millions of users that did not directly and explicitly authorize their data to be analyzed. ~50M in the case of CA and ~180M in the case of OFA. Neither CA nor OFA broke any statues or laws, they both worked around loopholes and tricks in Facebook's TOS & API. 2. CA used the data to intentionally spread and optimizing the sharing of bogus news. I haven't yet heard this exact argument made for why this specific case was bad, though I suspect it's implied, but it seems like that is just a piece of the problem. Interestingly however, the contents of the targeted ads seems immaterial to the most important argument which is that this was a "breach" of private user data - a completely separate argument. Your last point I think sums it up well, Trump and his cronies used the system against itself and people don't like it. Full stop. It wasn't the fact that he used it, because others did, it was the fact that he used it in a way that we didn't expect or like (not that it broke laws). I mean say what you will but it truly embodies the hacker ethos.

ucaetano 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism