The data & privacy abuse by the Obama campaign was in fact dramatically worse. As an opinion piece at TheHill.com noted today:
> The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
It's universally understood why the media wasn't interested in turning that story into a scandal. When it's your team, you look the other way for the perceived greater good.
> It's universally understood why the media wasn't interested in turning that story into a scandal.
I agree that it's bad (not just looks bad), but you can't blame the media for something they didn't know about. Fox News went on for years about Benghazi. So in 2018, you can't complain about media being too friendly to democrats.
Also, the piece links to a tweet[1] in 2018, not an article from 2012.
That's interesting but it's also just television. I'd ask what the rural/urban split is on television versus Internet syndication, and then see what comes out on top.
The Trump case complicates "dramatically worse," since the issue is that the data was sold to third parties who ultimately affected the election with it.
The whole point of gathering data on voters is so that you can affect the election with it. The whole point of campaigning is affecting elections. Elections are not some input-free, side-effect free process performed in a vacuum. If they were, campaigning would be illegal.
This leak was not the biggest, or even the most detailed source of voter information controlled by the Republican party.
What Facebook did is a disservice to it's users - not to the democratic process. Framing it is as such is nothing but sour grapes.
the issue is that the data was sold to third parties
Afaik, there has been no allegation that Facebook sold this data. Rather, someone created an innocuous looking quiz app that then used its access tokens to gather data on people through the Facebook Graph API. The app was called "thisisyourdigitallife".
who ultimately affected the election with it.
I've seen zero evidence that any of the psychobabble being touted by CA had any effect on the election (and I've been scouring the internet for such proof). As much as it may pain Democrats to hear, it's possible that Hillary just lost because she was unpalatable to a large percentage of voters, and not because of Russian conspiracies/Facebook/CA. She had more than her share of baggage.
This is more of an aside, but given that Clinton lost by so little, _very many things_ caused her to lose. Because of such a small margin, for almost any X: "X had little effect" and "X caused Clinton to lose" can be simultaneously true.
If you lose by only one vote, then every vote caused you to lose.
(Of course if you're running a campaign, going after things that are bigger issues is more useful, but when we're talking about billion dollar operations, you can go after everything in theory)
She did lose by quite a bit, though. 74 electoral votes out of 538. And that’s after rigging the primaries and spending twice as much as Trump did. Not even 1.2 billion could make this albatross fly.
It sounds like a lot, but it ends up not being much. It was, of course, 40k votes over 3 states. But most Presidential elections the winner carries more than 320 electoral votes. Bush 2 had pretty slim margins, of course. Before that, you need to go back to Carter to get 297 electoral votes.
It's not the tightest margin, but it's among the lowest margin of victories in the electoral college. Not that it matters, because you either win or lose. And we all know the rules of the game before we start playing
Electoral votes are a terrible way to measure the closeness of an election though. You could win every state by a single vote, and according to the electoral votes it would look like a blowout, but in reality it would have been the closest election in modern history.
> The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
It's universally understood why the media wasn't interested in turning that story into a scandal. When it's your team, you look the other way for the perceived greater good.