Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

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There were hundreds (if not thousands) of FB apps from that time period that pulled comparable social graphs before FB switched to the v2 Graph API

That is simply not true. Facebook rate-limited apps for exactly this reason. Additionally, although it was technically possible, the TOS did not allow mass-scraping of friend data for any purpose, much less political purposes. Facebook monitored and routinely banned apps long before they ever accessed the data of even a few million friend profiles, let alone 190 million of them. That's why, according to Obama's own campaign manager, Facebook was "surprised" but then decided not to ban them - which they would have done to any other app.

the data was used for political microtargeting (in violation of FB's TOS)

Which is precisely what Obama did.

If you know of any evidence that Obama's campaign broke either the law or FB's ToS, please let me know.

See above.

I think the point neuronexmachina was trying to make about microtargeting is that Obama simply asked their users to send messages to their friends, whereas CA directly advertised to people.

The Obama campaign used that data in every way that CA did. The fact that the app only represented that it was sending messages to friends is just as misleading as what Kogan (not CA, who never had an app) did. They used this data that 99.5% of the people didn't authorize them to have for targeting, campaign strategy, etc.

Again, collecting data about friends while being upfront about the purpose is very different from collecting friends data with completely false pretenses, selling the data(Alex), and then later lying to Facebook that it was deleted when it was not(CA).

You keep stating the same allegations and assumptions, and now including statistics, without sources.

But this then suggests that we should look far more closely at the Hillary campaign and see why it didn’t win.

Was it bad management ?

Was it not using Facebook data effectively ?

Was CA that pivotal? Was it fake news or better microtargetting?

If both sides used it why did one side lose?

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