You've piqued my interest with this comment because, read literally, you seem to be against hate.

Hating isn't illegal, immoral or even necessarily a bad idea. Hate can be justified. Hate is dangerous in politics as is any strong emotion. Trying to hold a country together demands compromise, which in turn requires moderation.

Facebook is empowering mass surveillance and propaganda, and encourages outrage and knee-jerk reactions. Trying to separate out who is using that power for good or ill and judge equivalence based on that is risky. If the judgment is wrong great damage will be done.

It is better to to acknowledge that power in itself is dangerous, and political power should be carefully controlled. Controlling and limiting political power has been a very successful strategy leading to excellent results in the past.

I agree with all of the above, and I'm not saying that what they did is illegal (for that reason - though IMO it was illegal through election laws). I'm saying it's not useful to claim "Obama's campaign did the same" when these guys were bragging about creating divisive, bigoted, violent content and aiming them at a susceptible audience. [1]

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cHYYHF...

also, CA did this [1], which is quite illegal and immoral:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/cambridge-an...

So the exploitation of massive amounts of personal data from unwilling participants is ok as long as you agree with the person doing it?

From the words of the person in charge of this:

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997

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They [Facebook] 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.

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You just have to be on the right "side" that's all.

I wonder if anyone went back and ensure they deleted all the data they harvested, then went back and verified that they didn't lie. And in case they didn't, wonder what the media response would be and how many articles would be written about it.

Of course, the same person tweeted immediately after that, replying to the tweet you quote:

"I am also 100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side."

Sadly, that seems to be the case.

Cambridge Analytica did far worse than Obama's team. They lied about the purpose of the app to steal social graph data. But fundamentally, the abuse of social graph information is the same. They may have gone to different ends (getting people to vote for obama, vs getting people to not vote for clinton), but they are fundamentally the same types of activity.

You can't tell it was appropriate for Obama's social media team to steal the social graph and use that to target people (who did not approve their information being obtained).