I’d be fine with it, but the first step is admitting that yes, Obama benefited from harvested social media data as well. No one wants to do that, this is all a Trump thing as far as the media, and therefore the general public, is concerned.
the first is explicitly political; the second is actively hiding their intentions
*edit: also they used the data very differently. obama used it to push people’s hopes and dreams; trump used it to push people’s fears. overall, obamas campaign was FAR more positive than trumps
By their own words the Obama Campaign ingested the whole social graph because the single person they targeted could bring in the information of all their friends:
Facebook 2012 election had the ability
for people to opt in the Obama campaign
like rocked this right we got people to
opt in and the privacy policies at that
time on Facebook were that if they opted
in they could tell us who all their
friends were
[...]
but we were actually able
to ingest the entire social network
social network of the US that's on
Facebook which is most people most
people where this gets complicated is
that freaks Facebook out right so they
shut off the feature well the
Republicans never built an app to do
that so the data is out there you can't
take it back right so the Democrats have
this information so when they look at a
voter file and someone comes to them
they can immediately be like oh here are
all the other people that they know and
here are people that they can help us
persuade because they're really good
friends with this person the Republicans
do not have that information and will
not get that information
Because whataboutism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
What Obama did was unethical as far as I'm concerned, as is most modern marketing. (I will say one campaign was selling hope and progressive change while the other was fear mongering and spreading divisiveness. So I think there is a difference.) Having said that, I don't know that it matters. Granting these powers to people we happen to like doesn't mean they won't be abused by people we don't. Modern mass marketing is gross. It's the grand scale manipulation of people by exploiting individual human weakness/bias. I'd like to see some smart regulation around it, but I'm skeptical that will happen.
Ah, the current flavour of the year on reddit when it comes to debates.
It's not whataboutism. It's calling out hypocrisy among the reaction of journalists and general public who either ignored or in fact went on to rave about ingenious use of ads. In fact fb personally went on to remove api rate-limiters for one of the apps used by Obama's campaign. Suddenly now that it's someone that left/liberals don't like is in power, these very same practices are being questioned.
And more specifically, it's calling out the fact that the whole CA thing could have been prevented if, instead of fawning over the Obama campaign's use of targeted advertising in 2012, the media instead collectively asked, "wait, you did _what_ with our data?"
So, it's exactly Whataboutism: “Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery) is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument, [...]”
And calling out hypocrisy isn't wrong thing to do in this matter. I'm not saying what trump's campaign did was the right thing to do. What i find appalling is the so called "literate/educated" class of people completely ignored and continue to ignore or in fact praised the very same thing Obama did.
Heck, i'm neither a citizen of USA nor a resident and could frankly care less who is in power.
No, I'm deflecting, if anything, a distraction from the argument, by not accepting the shift in subject matter.
My only argument in this subthread was that the charge of Whataboutism was correctly made, and cannot be rebutted with a claim of pointing to hypocrisy, since Whataboutism is exactly the fallacy of pointing to hypocrisy to avoid the topic of debate.
Person i replied to clearly uses whataboutism in negative manner and dismisses valid points of use of extended unauthorized data by OFA (Obama for America).
"What Obama did was unethical as far as I'm concerned, as is most modern marketing. (I will say one campaign was selling hope and progressive change while the other was fear mongering and spreading divisiveness. So I think there is a difference.) Having said that, I don't know that it matters"
Because the forthcoming regulations will inevitably target conservatives if we allow the public discourse on this issue to be dominated by "muh Russia, muh Trump."
The forthcoming regulations are going to have to make it through a republican house, a republican senate and a republican president and not get challenged in our republican courts. Rest assured you're safe.