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tomnipotent

> People were openly weeping in their offices after he was elected, execs gave people time off to cope.

Same thing happened to certain classes of companies when Obama was elected, so what?

> The parent poster is correct

No they weren't. You don't just get to pass off an idea as fact.

> praised as savvy is now being eliminated

Because of bad press that's not worth the tiny revenues political ads bring in vs. everything else. Maybe they've simply made the better economic decision to avoid the revenue impact of these class of ads. Much more likely than "Tech Giants collude to deny Trump campaign access to social media advertising".

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Can you please edit out name-calling from your comments to HN, and generally not do flamewars here? From "This is a silly, childish conspiracy theory" and "Suuuuure" to "Have you been living under a rock", your comments stand out in this thread as particularly breaking the site guidelines.

If you have better information or know more of the truth than other commenters, it's important to present that in a form which readers can respect and learn from. Otherwise you end up discrediting the very truth you're advocating for, leaving us all worse off.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You keep calling it a conspiracy theory without providing any evidence that it is. It's a known fact that Obama was praised for targeted political advertising:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

It's also a fact that these very left leaning platforms are now removing the ability to do exactly what Obama was praised for.

You've not disputed either of those, just called the people pointing them out childish conspiracy theorists.

To be fair they aren't entirely comparable even if they are both talked about as targetting. The Obama campaign was more about organizing as opposed to underhanded actions like abusing loose permissions.

The emphasis of reporting on the targetting as opposed to the worse moral dodginess confuses me even from a cynical "assume jealousy from old media" perspective. I only have vague guesses of incompetence for not emphasizing the even worse parts or not being their target audience.

Aren't they almost exactly the same though? From the article:

> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.

That's literally the thing people are upset that Cambridge Analytica did.

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