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remotecool

I've always been curious why nobody cared when Obama misused Facebook data in 2012 to win the election.

I remember countless tech articles lauding him as a genius and talking about how this would be the new way to campaign.

Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. They then closed the door for other politicians.

This sort of election meddling is worse than the Russians.

The mainstream media doesn`t care because they supported the person that did it.

It really seems like it only matters because a Republican was involved. If Hillary had won, things would be business as usual and we wouldn't even know about election interference.

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I’ve struggled with the what-about-ism there as well. When researching it I’ve found there are some differences, particularly about degree of openness towards the people targeted:

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar...

Both campaigns misused data in an attempt to win votes. They are equally bad.

At the end, it states that neither campaign were able to persuade many voters. If that's the case, why do we care?

One campaign did it with consent. The other did not. That's not equal.

This seems false. The root of the problem is the FB API used to grant you access to friend-of-friend data. This capability is what led to the possibility of having a million sign ups get you data on the entire US. Those people mined through second order links did not give consent.

You seem really relaxed about foreign powers interfering with our elections.

>You seem really relaxed about foreign powers interfering with our elections.

The reality is that Americans have historically been quite relaxed about the US interfering in others' elections - they do it more than any other country.[1] At least they're consistent if they're relaxed when it happens the other way round.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506625913/database-tracks-his...

And in order to change that we would need to vote in the people that foreign powers are hindering the campaigns of.

I'm not relaxed about anyone interfering with our elections either a domestic private company or a foreign power.

Both subvert Democracy.

Russia is really a non-issue. They have a pittance in terms of economy and a handful of bots and phishing attacks didn't really do anything to change the election.

The stadiums of people that still come out for Trump supports this.

We should be worried about big tech. They are altering our elections through massive censorship of opposing views and search result tampering to change the definition of the 'truth'.

If the Ceos of these companies were Republicans, there would be endless lawsuits.

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