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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

"[Facebook] came to 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." - Carol Davidsen, Former Obama Campign Director [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997

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The NYT magazine article about this also mentions that the scale of the Obama campaign's data extraction tripped internal Facebook alerts which had to be overridden: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaig... (Back in 2013, they of course spun this as a demonstration of just how impressive and well-done it was.)

This all should serve as another reminder to not yield certain leniencies to "our" guys just because we want them to have an advantage. Because it sets a precedent, and then future organizations, like CA, can do the same thing for people we don't like.

Nice. So they intentionally helped Obama, but indirectly helping Trump has caused international outrage.

I'd say its that the intervening years have shed the bloom from the rose that was Facebook, and a lot more people have become a lot more savvy to the topic since then. That makes CA the tipping point for public sentiment in the US, but Europe has been ahead of us for these types of concerns. Worth noting that i haven't seen many people placing blame on the Trump campaign either, it seems to be going swuarely where it belongs: CA and Facebook. It would be nice if more splashed on to other big players for this type of data too, like google. Google hasn't yet betrayed their trust to as great an extent though.

I disagree. Its undoubtedly a political issue. When it was used by Obama, the media lauded it as a genius use of tech and proof that his campaign was 'hooked in' to modern tools. Trump is obviously less popular in certain circles, which is the only reason why this is now a huge issue.

The Obama campaign took all that data and did normal political campaigning with it: targeting likely voters and bombarding them with campaign messaging. Cambridge Analytica ran Facebook-powered ratfucking operations: for example, organizing Black Lives Matter rallies with violent messaging, then highlighting the violent BLM rallies to scared white rural voters.

Facebook should never have facilitated this level of data collection for any campaign, but characterizing the current anger at Facebook as media-driven favoritism is Internet Research Agency level trolling.

Yep, liberals are so full of themselves and surround themselves with other liberals only, so the thought of someone actually voting differently is hard to fathom for them, be it Trump, Brexit, Le Pen. They are trying to rationalize it somehow that the poor people are being manipulated by Russia/fake news/Facebook/CA/insert the next week's boogeyman.

And that's why I am getting downvoted for pointing out the obvious. Classic HN.

Claiming that other people are ignorant doesn't justify your own ignorant argument. The only things you have showed here is that you thinks all liberals are the same and that they must be acting irrational. Which is exactly what you accuse all of them of doing, something far more implausible since they are a large group of people.

That of course doesn't conclude that liberals or what you prescribe to liberals is correct. But there were still significant differences between the reelection of Obama, a sitting president who won with a lesser margin than expected and Trump, an outsider not only to politics but the republican party, who won by a slim margin targeting certain fringe issues and key states.

That is overly simplistic. Undoubtedly Trump's unpopular status has helped the issue gain traction this time around, but there are two key aspects you can't overlook here: First, CA obtained the data improperly, raising the new question of just how much abuse has occurred. Second, blame here isn't being cast on Trump or his campaign, but the entities that improperly obtained data, or allowed it to happen.

Further, the "only angry because it's President Trump" narrative ignores the fact that there has been a rising tide of concern and pushback on data collection and customer surveillance business models. The fact that Trump's campaign was involved may have been a catalyst, but a catalyst cannot operate in a vacuum, it requires very specific preconditions, ready and primed for that spark. And the longer it builds, the smaller the spark needs to be.

I believe it's quite obvious that the campaign director either remembers this wrong, or the person they talked to gave them the wrong reason.

Why? Because four years later, Facebook would let Cambridge Analytica do something similar without having a reason to particularly like them.

And even after learning about CA's breach of trust, they chose to mostly remain inactive, even when they learnt that the company was working for Ted Cruz and Trump, two candidates you probably wouldn't want to help if you're making business decisions based on political sympathy.

First, Facebook didn’t allow CA to do anything. That’s because CA didn’t ever have an app on Facebook. The app in question was a personality quiz created by an independent developer. It accessed a small fraction of the number of profiles that OFA did, and it was only able to do so over a much longer period of time. The data from the app was then sold to CA years after the fact. It was a normal app that operated within the normal parameters imposed by Facebook on all other applications.

That’s far different than the Obama situation. They accessed ~4 times the number of profiles, and were allowed to keep the data current because Facebook voluntarily removed the API limits for them. Why would you question Obama’s own campaign director? As if it were a secret that Facebook is left leaning and wanted to help Obama.

> Why would you question Obama’s own campaign director? As if it were a secret that Facebook is left leaning and wanted to help Obama.

Precisely because everyone knows/thinks Facebook was sympathetic towards Obama, I believe it's not unthinkable that someone used that fact as an explanation when they were asked and did not actually know the specific reason.

Her statements are highly specific.

Because four years later, Facebook would let Cambridge Analytica do something similar without having a reason to particularly like them.

Ruling out money as a reason seems a bit presumptuous.

I hope you can take a step back and realize that this is one of the most blatant examples of mental gymnastics / cognitive dissonance that I personally have ever seen. In the face of direct, first-hand evidence that the Obama campaign did exactly the same thing that the media and social media ecosystem is now very angry at Trump for doing, your response is literally to go into denial about it, and insist that the evidence is inaccurate. You are essentially just yelling "fake news". This exact behavior, denying reality when it goes against what you want to believe, is how we get people insisting that climate change isn't real, and discrimination doesn't exist. Shame on you. I truly believe that you're better than this, please use this as a growing moment.

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