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Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

I just said this in another comment but it so belongs here, I'll try to say it in just one sentence: there was a feel-good narrative to Obama that's just impossible now.

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Obama had the Obama 2012 app (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nafYT7_i4as). Anyone downloading it knew that the goal of it was to help get Obama elected.

CA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ) tricked people into giving up their data and used it to spread targeted propaganda.

How is this the same?

I wasn't talking about that, I was talking about this:

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

> Anyone downloading it knew that the goal of it was to help get Obama elected.

Was Obama 2012 restricted to collecting information of its downloaders? Or did it collect all of the downloaders' friends' information as well? Facebook certainly allowed for this (until 2014, that is).

They pulled the whole friend graph and used it to generate emails pushing supporters to reach out to specific named friends who live in specific states.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...

So far, no POTUS' actions (taken as a whole) support a feel-good narrative. Unpleasant compromises, manipulation, and dishonesty may be inherent to winning a national election and then running a 330-million-person organization.

It is such an eye opening experience to see how media frames things when they try to support or sabotage somebody. This seems so far the clearest demonstration for anyone remotely interested in the topic.

So could you educate us by showing the comparable actions of the Obama campaign?

Didn't Obama's campaign hire Droga5 to do precisely the same sort of ad targeting that CA was involved in? Ultimately, it doesn't seem that CA did anything out of the norm for any marketing analytics company (from what I've read, correct me if I'm wrong).

Did you read the article? They paid several hundred thousand people via Mechanical Türk to download their poll app and then harvested 50M users data for political targeting.

Data they could have acquired directly from FB anyway? It seems like they found a way to make the data acquisition process more efficient (while also violating FB's TOS, which is the actual problem here).

But the point is, the methods CA used to influence voters weren't significantly different from Obama's 2012 campaign.

There is a giant difference here in the fact that the data acquired for CA was through a third party. Data obtained through the Obama campaign was through the Obama app.

This Washington Post article has details. Obama Supporters clicked OK on apps, those apps pulled their friend graph (including the state of residence of friends) to generate outreach such as emails encouraging the supporter to evangelize specifically named friends on behalf of the campaign: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...

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