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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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