That of course doesn't conclude that liberals or what you prescribe to liberals is correct. But there were still significant differences between the reelection of Obama, a sitting president who won with a lesser margin than expected and Trump, an outsider not only to politics but the republican party, who won by a slim margin targeting certain fringe issues and key states.

Further, the "only angry because it's President Trump" narrative ignores the fact that there has been a rising tide of concern and pushback on data collection and customer surveillance business models. The fact that Trump's campaign was involved may have been a catalyst, but a catalyst cannot operate in a vacuum, it requires very specific preconditions, ready and primed for that spark. And the longer it builds, the smaller the spark needs to be.

Facebook should never have facilitated this level of data collection for any campaign, but characterizing the current anger at Facebook as media-driven favoritism is Internet Research Agency level trolling.

Why? Because four years later, Facebook would let Cambridge Analytica do something similar without having a reason to particularly like them.

And even after learning about CA's breach of trust, they chose to mostly remain inactive, even when they learnt that the company was working for Ted Cruz and Trump, two candidates you probably wouldn't want to help if you're making business decisions based on political sympathy.

That’s far different than the Obama situation. They accessed ~4 times the number of profiles, and were allowed to keep the data current because Facebook voluntarily removed the API limits for them. Why would you question Obama’s own campaign director? As if it were a secret that Facebook is left leaning and wanted to help Obama.

Precisely because everyone knows/thinks Facebook was sympathetic towards Obama, I believe it's not unthinkable that someone used that fact as an explanation when they were asked and did not actually know the specific reason.

Ruling out money as a reason seems a bit presumptuous.