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Comment by DevKoala | Hacker News Reader

> Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp. That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025703

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I was working on things adjacent to data journalism at the time, which helped!

If anything, this has come much more true than I anticipated. I hadn’t got as far as Cambridge Analytica.

> Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.

Who's scalp was it? I don't know any politician who has been taken to task over network analysis and data mining. Fore sure not Obama, whose staffers have quietly chortled that they did far worse than Cambridge Analytica ever did. Definitely not Trump, his numbers are as even as they haev ever been. Maybe Zuckerberg? But he's still CEO of his company.

Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign claims their data operation is how they won in the Rust Belt.

To me it seems obvious that Hillary Clinton was the one who pulled (or pushed) the victory in Trumps direction, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by some really interesting remarks about her core voters.

(Disclaimer: Not an American, don't like Hillary Clinton and definitely not Donald Trump.)

I can see how one would get that impression based on our media, but it would be an oversimplification to say the least. The history of Hillary Clinton is too complex and long to get into for the purposes of this discussion.

Suffice to say the Trump campaign made a concerted effort to use data to target ads at specific groups in the Rust Belt with the intention of de-legitimizing her as a Presidential candidate.

I believe the "taking the scalp" could also be a reference for its intended offensive power, not just the scandal of using it.

In that light, the answer is obvious: Hillary Clinton!

(And before someone complaints, which someone will definitely still do: Given the extremely close election, it is possible, even likely, that any single one of maybe a dozen issues had the potential to change the outcome: Just being a bit better as a candidate would have been enough. That e-mail "scandal" getting the same attention as the dozens of carbon copies of it since revealed in the Trump Cabinet, i. e. none, would have sufficed. Defences against Russian interference, or even just widespread knowledge of the attacks, could have been enough etc. etc.

The EU? David Cameron?

Is the politics of information a liberal issue? Other than their complaints about Russia, it doesn't seem like there's many speaking out against the inordinate political power wielded by information overlords like Facebook and Google

I would say is held up until 2016. After the election of Trump and the ensuing Russophobia, mainstream liberals became allied with the security state (CIA, NSA, FBI), and quickly turned on former liberal heroes like Snowden, Assange, Manning etc.

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