I still consider that attitude a bad one, because it detracts from the seriousness of the issue. When people say "this is not new" many of those who read that will go "well, I guess I shouldn't be that outraged about it" - even if they were super-outraged a minute ago. The only thing that changed is that they learned that "it's not new", which implies "they can't do anything about it anyway, so they should just settle down".

I've seen a lot of these comments post-Snowden revelations, even though they were false, and that the mass-scale on which the NSA surveillance operated was indeed new - at least a decade new, but even newer if you consider how many people knew about it until then.