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jstalin | 8 years ago

Who remembers how the Obama campaign's social media analytics and strategy were breathlessly praised?

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karmelapple|8 years ago

Is there a difference in the means and ends?

I don’t think we have fully enough information yet, but if a political campaign is using analytics to clearly advertise their campaign, fine, that’s being straightforward.

If a political campaign is posting in ways that do not clearly label it as a political campaign, and is lying to people viewing the data it is paying to show, would you agree that’s kind of a different situation?

There’s not enough information yet I think to claim what was shown, but if political campaigns are not labeling their ads clearly, that is in violation of a variety of state - and some federal - laws.

specialist|8 years ago

The cognitive ability to be aghast over false equivalencies continues to amaze me.

Also, rationalizing cheating, because they're certain everyone's doing do it, so it's only proper when the better cheater wins.

ams6110|8 years ago

Absolutely they were, and many comparisons were made to the Romney campaign's ineptitude in this area.

s2g|8 years ago

were they spreading misinformation?

cratermoon|8 years ago

[deleted]

dictum|8 years ago

I do adhere to the view that wrong is wrong even when others do it, but I'd like a better look into the big data fantasy of the past decade, and that includes a deeper look into the times when this social/data/analytics/targeting bonanza seemed sweet because the teams who were more adept at it were not associated with people or institutions one abhors.

Whataboutism taints conversations when it's an excuse; other kinds of excuses also shut down conversations that should be had.

More plainly, the CA approach to starting the graph was nauseatingly scammy, but how many friends of Obama supporters (and perhaps Clinton - the API changed before the campaign, but maybe some data persisted with the DNC) were aware that their data was being processed by political parties?

briandear|8 years ago

Interesting how whataboutism became a common use term recently -- when people started pointing out hypocrisy, suddenly we care about whataboutism?

Hypocrisy is what I care about and there's enough of it to repave the entire Interstate system. When someone criticized Obama or Democrats, the first words in response was some variation of "Bush..." Blame Bush was a competitive sport. Whatabout that?

theseatoms|8 years ago

Also known as, "having principles."

See also, "consistency."

oh_sigh|8 years ago

Sure do. This kind of double speak is rampant. One that bubbles to the top of my head is that when some people were targeted for anti-HRC messages(I think specifically it was Haitian Americans on the gulf coast), then that was labeled as "voter suppression", but targeting likely voters for Trump and spreading negative information about him, say the access Hollywood tapes, is "informing the voters"

nopriorarrests|8 years ago

Yes, it's funny. Titles for two articles, both are easy to google:

1. How Obama’s Team Used Big Data to Rally Voters (MIT Technology Review, 2012)

2. How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions (NYT, 2018)

No bias here.

Spooky23|8 years ago

There’s a difference between implying that a racial/ethnic group will get hassled or deported, etc due to their race and saying that Trump said douchey things in an interview.

Voter suppression is a term of art that means something. Democrats generally don’t engage in it because more people voting usually translates to more people voting democrat.

s2g|8 years ago

Bit of a difference between "he said <this>" vs "news" stories about Clinton conspiring to keep drug prices high. The source for the latter was an email where someone rejected the idea of negotiating american prices so as to avoid derailing ongoing negotiations into drug pricing in Africa.

It's also not news when it's some story about a town in <state> adopting Sharia law. At least the drug pricing thing is halfway true in some convoluted form.