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Comment by noetic_techy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

> (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.

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.

> 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.

Right, but then you said Obama was doing the same thing. He was not. Nor was Clinton. So the fact of the matter is that it may have come up, but there's been literally no evidence to suggest it's happened in the past by any of the winning Democratic campaigns.

That's the false equivalence I'm talking about. You're shifting blame away from the Republican party, the Trump campaign, and placing it solely on Facebook and unscrupulous data collection parties, when the issue should mostly be on the fact that a political campaign not only engaged said parties but won using them.

> 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.

And the words/documents provided by the CA whistleblower. That's immensely important.

> but we don't know that the Trump campaign knew about their data practices any more than their other customers knew.

Steve Bannon knew. Unless you're now claiming that he, as VP of CA, didn't know what his own company was doing.

> 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.

That's because you're removing broader context that shows that we should probably err on the side of "they probably knew about all this" rather than "there's no way they could have known".

The fact is, CA was testing phrases used by the Trump campaign literally years before they approached Trump. The Mercers pumped money into the Trump campaign at a critical time (June 2016), and forced all campaign processes to go through CA. This is all documented. In August of that year, Bannon left CA (which was already running Trump's campaign) and joined the Trump campaign directly.

You're trying to pretend like there's more ambiguity than there actually is.

EDIT: The latter half of this article goes in depth on how the Mercer's money shifted from Ted Cruz to Trump: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/us/politics/robert-mercer...

> Right, but then you said Obama was doing the same thing.

No. I didn't say anything like that. I literally said "people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff" and my point was to the parent post who said "Its purely Trump hatred driving this".

You missed the point because you don't like that I'm not blaming this entirely on Trump.

I want an investigation into all of this. And other sketchy behavior surrounding the Trump campaign.

But I was stating that I don't think the parent post was correct in saying that this is all about Trump.

> You're trying to pretend like there's more ambiguity than there actually is.

You're trying to pretend like there's more certainty than there actually is and that this is somehow all Trump's fault.

I think that's dangerous because the Trump team keeps claiming that there's a witch hunt going on so when all new scandals are pinned to him it actually helps them as far as optics go. We need to investigate this all and get to the bottom of it and I hope Trump is exposed for the scam artist that he is in the process.

> I literally said "people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff" and my point was to the parent post who said "Its purely Trump hatred driving this".

Right, but that's still comparing the current amount of information we have on what the Trump campaign and CA did to mere baseless accusations. The comparison is implicit.

> because you don't like that I'm not blaming this entirely on Trump.

No, I don't like the fact that you're trying to cast this as mere accusation like the many false accusations against other prior campaigns.

> But I was stating that I don't think the parent post was correct in saying that this is all about Trump.

And I agree with that bit. Which is why I didn't engage it. Instead, I engaged the implicit false equivalence that the parent post was outright stating and that you were merely suggesting.

> You're trying to pretend like there's more certainty than there actually is

And yet you haven't refuted any of my statements, sources, or facts.

> and that this is somehow all Trump's fault.

Just like how it's the fault of the person composing and releasing doxxing info, not the fault of the person the dox is about for putting it online.

So if it isn't Trump's fault, whose is it? Bannon's? CA? The Mercer's?

> the Trump team keeps claiming that there's a witch hunt going on so when all new scandals are pinned to him it actually helps them as far as optics go

Are you seriously suggesting that we not use new information as it comes out to paint a larger picture, simply because of the optics on the part of Trump?

> We need to investigate this all and get to the bottom of it

We are. The media is. And this is what is coming out. What, are we not supposed to connect the very obvious and extremely public dots? Are we just supposed to pretend that the Paradise Papers don't exist and don't show money being moved around from sanctioned, Kremlin-owned finances, through shell companies residing in tax havens, and finally on to various American/European companies like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica?

We have different approaches but we're on the same side in case you haven't picked up on that.

I agree with you on most of these points but until the proper investigations proceed not much will happen. And this administration will attempt to block or obstruct any investigations that they think are part of a "witch hunt" so putting too much emphasis on Trump himself seems risky in the meantime. Let the investigators put those dots together.

Also, Trump is just the tip of the iceberg in this story of corruption. Companies like CA and groups like Internet Research Agency need to share this blame because Trump didn't create them. He just benefited from them (because he has no morals).

PS: If you haven't contacted your representatives (or candidates) to ask them to support ongoing investigations into these particular issues (like the Special Counsel one). Do it please. Especially if you have a representative up for reelection.

> We have different approaches but we're on the same side in case you haven't picked up on that.

I did. I'm just more concerned with giving an accurate picture of what happened than trying to pass off some kind of false equivalency.

> but until the proper investigations proceed not much will happen. And this administration will attempt to block or obstruct any investigations that they think are part of a "witch hunt" so putting too much emphasis on Trump himself seems risky in the meantime. Let the investigators put those dots together.

On the contrary, its necessary that we connect these dots. IMO, it's an insurance policy against the eventuality that Trump decides to fire Mueller or stall/block the FBI investigation. We the people need to democratize this information and disseminate it whenever possible.

This is not normal. This is not business as usual. This is a tale of a corrupt political campaign using every dirty trick in the book, the likes of which we've never seen before, and winning because of it. Every party involved deserves to be punished, but the fact of the matter is that while we can't do much to stop people from putting together intel via publicly available data sets, we sure as heck can do something about corrupt politicians using said data sets.

In much the same way, we punish the doxxer for using the dox, not the target for putting said information online in the first place, or the social networks for giving them the outlets to publish said information. Obviously Facebook deserves some blame, especially if they were somehow complicit in this (in as far as investment money/advice from Russian sanctioned industries/individuals).

> IMO, it's an insurance policy against the eventuality that Trump decides to fire Mueller or stall/block the FBI investigation.

We really do need to make sure that doesn't happen and make sure they don't grab any more power while they have the upper hand.

As far as getting people to see realize this stuff... You can't convince a Trump supporter of the sheer level of corruption as long as they think there's a witch hunt trying to make this stuff up.

First the evidence has to be established and legitimized without being attached to Trump at all or the premise of the evidence is compromised in their mind. Does that make sense?

Suppose a report came out that shows how drinking soda is actually good for you. But it was published by the sugar industry. Even if they had some good points you'd probably be skeptical. That's how these people will feel as long as the narrative of this being a witch hunt is perpetuated.

> This is not normal. This is not business as usual. This is a tale of a corrupt political campaign using every dirty trick in the book

I agree.

> Obviously Facebook deserves some blame, especially if they were somehow complicit in this

I think we need to look into them for their data practices in general. Way beyond this case.

> First the evidence has to be established and legitimized without being attached to Trump at all

It already has been. The bread crumbs have been laid out for years now, and all it takes is looking back at all the legitimate outlets that were at the time slightly mystified by the occurrences.

We have outlets like Tech Crunch, The New York Times, Wall St. Journal, etc. all reporting on these things as they happened (as early as in 2009), and we are now able to piece them together thanks in part to the Paradise Papers.

> I think we need to look into them for their data practices in general. Way beyond this case.

Absolutely agreed.

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.

This. There's a lot of false equivalence going on in this thread.

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.

"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)

It's only a big deal when it's not us or our allies doing it.

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

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?

>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.

> 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.

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)

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-empl...

They leave out a critical fact, which you can find buried in The Hill article they deride:

Consciously or otherwise...

It was the same exact tactic, maybe only slightly less deceptive than CA's methods.

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

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-...

> 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.

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?

I'm working under the impression that they were aware of the specific "breach" some months ago, and only terminated their dealings with CA once the matter became public (so cutting off the revenue stream was done CA as a reaction to bad PR, not because of any moral rightness or a reaction to any policy or contract breach).

Oh, I was under the impression that business relation was with some university researcher and finished a while ago. The researcher didn't delete the data, and instead brought it to CA (Facebook didn't deal with CA directly). Facebook found out some time ago but did nothing more than tell them to delete it and trust they would, without really informing anyone or pushing further.

I'm not sure how authoritative it is but this tweet [1] claims otherwise.

[1] https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953

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.

> 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.

If they were serious about denouncing him, why not put up an opposing candidate?

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.

> 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.

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.

Here is the first sentence of his wikipedia page.

"Arthur Joseph Jones (born January 1, 1948) is an American neo-Nazi, white nationalist, perennial candidate and Holocaust denier."

What would you call this person in order to be polite?

He actually is a Nazi. That is not hyperbole. His name is Arthur Jones.

He just won his party's primary, which means he has been elected to be on the ballot as a member of his party. Not anyone can run as, e.g., a member of the Republican Party. You need to be nominated first, and you do that by winning a primary. The position is in US Congress.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/us/politics/arthur-jones-...

Didn't call anyone a Nazi, except the Nazi, who just won a Republican primary.

Try again.

Sorry for that - you can't believe my surprise that you really do have an actual Nazi running. That's honestly unbelievable. I hope you can understand why I assumed you were being hyperbolic.

So I'm uninformed on the subject -- what are the differences between what Obama and Trump campaigns did with Facebook?

I'll be honest: There's plenty of information out there that will help you make that comparison. But I don't think it's super-useful unless your goal is to participate in these pointless "but Obama/Hillary did it" debates.

It's happening now and it happened during the Trump campaign (and others -- one massive difference is that Cambridge Analytica used this data for elections around the world). And you should be questioning whether that sort of exploitation of personal data is something that's a good or bad force in the world, whether it scares you or whether you're okay with it.

It's bad, but it should be bad uniformly, not just when the president is disliked by the technocrats. Same with the Russian meddling. Both sides of the aisle are in the Russian pockets, but only Trumps' admin gets the focus. If we are going to clean house, we need to clean the whole house.

> Both sides of the aisle are in the Russian pockets, but only Trumps' admin gets the focus.

This is 100% bullshit. Trump's apparent relationship with Russia goes lightyears beyond whatever made-up conservative fever-dream about Obama or Clinton is floating around out there.

It cannot be complete bs if the Clintons are selling uranium to Russians.

They aren't.

Highly questionable money transfers from the Russians to the Clinton Foundation, but I'm sure there's no foul play :)

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-uranium-ru...

"The Hill also reported receiving documents and eyewitness testimony “indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow,” although no specifics about who those Russian nuclear officials were or how the money was allegedly routed to the Clinton Foundation were given. In any case, none of these revelations prove that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton participated in a quid pro quo agreement to accept payment for approval of the Uranium One deal."

That page has a giant red FALSE on it and a point-by-point breakdown of why the story is bullshit.

No, the Clintons did not sell Uranium to Russia.

Is it? I'm sure I will get chided for bias quoting a hill article by Ben Shapiro, but as a Libertarian you really need to read both sides perspective to get the true story here. It highlights how the tactic was almost EXACTLY the same: Access facebooks data to build a database of possible supporters and target political messages to them. Obama's operation was only slightly less deceptive about it than CA and their scummy personality quiz chain mail.

My point is not the tactic though, my point is that the ONLY reason this has suddenly gone critical is because Trump is associated with it. It was ok then, its suddenly not now.

http://thehill.com/opinion/technology/379245-whats-genius-fo...

The key takeaway:

---

" “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. There’s a reason for that. The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & 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.”

Not so with Trump. As soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm. "

---

Consciously or otherwise ...

Another HN user linked to the opposing opinion:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...

I agree with this article also, Obama's team was slightly more above board with the original source of the data. After that it looks pretty similar. Remember that they chided Romney for NOT doing this and being behind the curve.

A question I'm asking myself: Would this have still been a scandal if CA was less scummy in their modus operandi?

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