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Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

> No but seriously why is the first step admitting that Obama benefitted?

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.

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>Because whataboutism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

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.

> 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.

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?"

> It's not whataboutism. It's calling out hypocrisy

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, [...]”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

In a way, aren't you deflecting the argument as well by labelling it instead of actually providing a logical answer of Why did everyone ignore or rave about Obama's use of over-reaching fb ads?

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.

> In a way, aren't you deflecting the argument

No, I'm deflecting, if anything, a distraction from the argument, by not accepting the shift in subject matter.

By refusing to answer upon the clear hypocrisy pointed out in your argument, because you have no answer. :)

> By refusing to answer upon the clear hypocrisy pointed out in your argument

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.

And you aptly ignored the context of the argument.

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"

Do you see how you have continued to pry the topic away from how to fix this issue that everyone agrees should be fixed? This is the desired outcome of whataboutism. Do you have any input of how to address the issue at hand other than commenting on the details of why people care today or when this problem started?

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