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Comment by quantumofmalice | Hacker News Reader

I'm relatively indifferent towards the matter, social media is cancer, but compare and contrast narratives:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/harper-reed-oba...

The actual influence of Cambridge Analytica - who also spectacularly failed to help Ted Cruz win the primaries - might have been greatly overstated, but the difference between this and the Obama campaign is that the latter isn't accused of breaking British data protection law with large scale scraping efforts and none of its executives have been caught on camera bragging about bribing and honeytrapping potential political challengers, and there isn't even a tenuous link between executives working for his team and alleged treasonous collusion with the uh...data mining efforts of a foreign superpower.

1) It seems like the Obama campaign was "above board", even giving interviews about what they were doing;

2) CA overstepped their agreement with Facebook, agreed to delete their data, and didn't

3) The CA process specifically harvested data from friends of people who'd signed up, including under false pretences.

4) The Channel 4 interview talking about bribes and entrapment: https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...

Edit: 5) It doesn't seem like anyone on the right claimed the Obama campaign was unethical in this way at the time?

Not sure it's so different. Here's from an Obama's campaign digital head:

> 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.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/03/19/why-are...

Whereas team Obama didn't just get friends of friends, they got everyone regardless of their privacy settings or apps in use?

edit: adding original source for the quote instead of forbes:

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975

The Obama campaign didn’t deceive users of its app, and it didn’t violate FB’s then policies, but it apparently did harvest friend-of-user data just as keenly as CA: https://twitter.com/jaypinho/status/975077567551197184

3 actually applies to the Obama campaign, though without the "false pretenses" part. The majority of people they harvested data on was via friends giving consent. But the other points remain important differences.

In addition to the other replies, I think one aspect people are ignoring is the "bias" of timing. The previous election occurred ~6 months prior to Edward Snowden's leaks. I think that was an inflection point in the US for the public and their perception of online data collection efforts. The Cambridge Analytica story is coming after 5 years of increasingly worsening public perception of personal data collection, privacy invasion, and digital surveillance. Prior to Snowden I don't think the majority of Americans understood the scope of the amount of data being collected on them, and what could be done with it.

The field of "data science" hadn't become quite as mainstream in 2012. These days you can't take 2 steps without tripping over articles about analytics, artificial intelligence, or machine learning.

Public perception of Silicon Valley has soured quite a bit during that time as well. Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. were all probably at the apex of their positive public images. I suspect that the average article regarding Silicon Valley from 2012 was much more positive than what you see these days.

In short, I don't think the contrasting narratives are as much do to with media bias regarding Obama vs. Trump as they do with major shifts in society from 2012 to 2018.

Are there differences to the approaches taken by Obama vs. Trump in terms of leveraging social media data? Did Obama do it in a more transparent way (is that even possible given the disconnect between the amount of data people give away vs. what they think is going on)?

Well, both try to reach an audience with their message, but one side is practically (if not literally) boasting that they are manipulating an deceiving their targets and using what they know about their prey against them.

Michael Simon (@mbsimon) who ran the microtargeting team for Obama in 08:

>How dare you! We didn’t steal private Facebook profile data from voters under false pretenses. OFA voluntarily solicited opinions of hundreds of thousands of voters. We didn’t commit theft to do our groundbreaking work.

There’s more in the thread: https://twitter.com/mbsimon/status/975231597183229953

What did you expect them to say?

“Don’t be so hard on CA. We had more people and much better data.”

I expect the fact that the OFA app was pulling friend data would be surprising to at least the friends. Which Facebook turned that feature off years ago.

Of course, they turned that feature off so that people looking to obtain microtargetting services will need to buy them from Facebook.

Which is funny. I've see some people talking about how the Clinton campaign relied on an in house data team for their Facebook work, and that the Trump campaign worked more closely with Facebook employees (the Facebook employees were on site at the campaign, working for free because the campaign was such a big customer).

> I expect the fact that the OFA app was pulling friend data would be surprising to at least the friends. Which Facebook turned that feature off years ago.

They did? I still see a "Apps others use" under the settings where I have to manually uncheck letting others share my information:

https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications

Facebook closed off the slurping of all your friends from the API with the app, and only shows those that have the same app.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/

There are parallel issues that muddy this debate where it concerns Facebook specifically (CA's self-reported extortion/blackmailing scheme) and issues that concern Facebook, but were/are standard practice, and widely requested by FB publishers, including media companies[0] (CA seeding the social graph with users of a non-election related app)

This tweet is sneaky. Users of the OFA app were voluntary; their friends weren't, and microtargeting of friends was of much greater value to a campaign (true believers are guaranteed, it's the undecided/uncaring who can move the needle) But that's speaking of ethics; under the terms of service all these actions were voluntary even for people who were never notified of what their friends had agreed to.

The one violation of FB terms may have been CA continuing to use the data after FB requested its deletion.

Still, as in parallel construction, once you have a good data set there are many ways in which you can reconstruct it and safely delete the original data.

Even if OFA did as FB asked and didn't keep data after the terms of service changed, they still had the knowledge, and it can be reconstructed (then that's another debate, which we may never get to until something flashy happens involving parallel construction)

[0]: Quiz time - if you wanted to collect as many third-party web trackers, what websites would you visit? To make it harder, you can only visit 5 sites - which ones?

The weird thing for me is the disconnect between that kind of stuff, which I've been interested in for a while (I read similarly interesting articles about how good the Republican use of computers for targetting where to get the vote out was in elections before Obama) and the CEO of a microtargeting operation offering to bribe opposition politicians or send prostitutes round to their house and catch it on camera.

Like, even if you wanted both those tasks done, why would you want the same people to do them both? It makes no sense to me at all.

I couldn't help thinking of V for Vendetta:

But if your ultimate goal is power, how best to use such a weapon? It's at this point in our story that along comes a spider. He's a man seemingly without a conscience, for whom the ends always justify the means

Perhaps such people are in short supply?

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