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The left is angry that President Trump's campaign used data mining to win the 2016 election. The left, both in media and the Democrats, were happy that Obama used data mining to win the 2012 election.
You have to hand it to conservative commentator Ben Shapiro for penning a column for The Hill on Tuesday with the headline: "What's genius for Obama is scandal when it comes to Trump."
Shapiro uncovered a 2012 report from The Guardian saying Obama's reelection team was mining data via Facebook (FB) to target specific voters. The Guardian also happens to be the publication that reported Cambridge Analytics and its ties to Trump's 2016 campaign.
Cambridge Analytica is accused of harvesting data to build profiles on 50 million FB users, who agreed to complete a survey in an attempt to target specific voters with ads and stories.
Shapiro said that FB was fine when Obama's team used similar tactics to what Trump's team used, noting that a former Obama campaign staffer admitted FB didn't attempt to stop Obama's 2012 re-election because the company wanted him to win.
The Obama campaign built a database of every voter using the same FB developer tools that Cambridge (known as API) used. This allowed Obama's campaign to gain information of voters to calculate "which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote," according to the Washington Post, a left-leaning tabloid.
"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," former Obama campaign staffer Carol Davidsen tweeted on Sunday from her verified account.
Davidsen said that FB revealed that the company allowed the Obama campaign to do things it would not have allowed a Republican candidate to get away with.
Shapiro explained, "Not so with Trump. As soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm. This isn't surprising. Since Trump's election, Democrats--in search of a rationale for their favored candidate's defeat--have blamed a bevy of social media outlets."
In other words, the Democrats are like children playing in the sandbox making up rules to games as they go along, and always favoring themselves.
FB has agreed to discuss matters with House Judiciary Committee staff as soon as today, Wednesday, after the fallout over Cambridge Analytica's use and exploitation of user data from about 50 million Americans.
Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been slammed for being silent on this issue, which needs to be explored for possible election tampering, in this writer's opinion.
Axios reported that Zuckerberg may finally break silence or perhaps wind.
In 2012, Time wrote a glowing article about the data mining used by Obama's team. It was headlined: "Friended: How the Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters." It explained how social networks are changing the way modern, sophisticated politicians campaign, and even stated that by 2016, "this sort of campaign-driven sharing over social networks is almost certain to be the norm."
But only Democratic politicians need apply.
Of course the headlines tying Trump's 2016 campaign to data mining were quite different and less glowing than Obama's.
The New York Times wrote: "How Trump consultants' exploited the Facebook Data of millions."
Did you catch the subtle difference?
Obama = genius. Trump = exploiter and a travesty of democracy.
Ironically, Shapiro doesn't believe the "supposedly nefarious workings" of data mining by Trump's campaign made any difference in the outcome of the election.
"It didn't win Trump the election, by the way. Trump won the election because Hillary was an unbelievably crappy candidate and Trump campaigned in the right places," Shapiro said. "It's just nonsense."
It's also something to think about regarding whether or not to stay on Facebook. Maybe it's time to say "Chuck it."
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