The problem with that statement is that you believe it was a catastrophic outcome. For the first time in history, media and new technology is able to instantly tell you if the president has so much as sneezed while the sitting president is a (highly controversial) Republican. Obama was considered a nightmare scenario for the American right, and if you listened to the right outlets, you heard every single one of Obama's missteps. Every poor decision, embarrassing association, or undelivered promise was constantly paraded as grounds for impeachment, but social media and what many consider "neutral" news sources have a noticeable progressive bent, and the Obama administration got the benefit of the doubt more often than not.
The Obama administration deported more undocumented immigrants than every past president minus HW Bush combined. The Obama administration killed over 3700 people (over 300 of which were civilians) in drone strikes. In that regard, Obama reportedly said that it "Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine." Attorney General Eric Holder was the first US cabinet member to be held in contempt of Congress, and Obama exercised executive privilege to support Holder's decision to withhold documents pertaining to Fast and Furious.
Most US citizens who actively use social media don't know those things (among many other controversies) happened, but they sure as shit know that "Donald Trump gets two scoops of ice cream", and constantly beat the dead "covfefe" horse; you can swipe right on Snapchat or Twitter to that social media company's curated news page and instantly hear every single slip-up and hot take that Trump has. This notion of a "catastrophic outcome" largely exists because for the first time, news outlets are at odds with the administration in the age of mass media.
It is of course a rote and entirely predictable exercise to take my statement that "this is a catastrophe", turn it around and say, "well Obama was a catastrophe for the right". I'm here to say that this is a false equivalency and the right has lost its mind. The conservative view of Obama is equivalent to the liberal view of Bush, that's a lot more reasonable. But the right has not has their "liberal Trump", and it is perfectly fine that they never will.
That is your opinion, and you're entitled to it. But do you not detect even a whiff of hypocrisy in this whole thing? It should have been portrayed as the terrible thing that it is today back when Obama did it. That is what I have an issue with.
Therefore, the left has no incentive to fight the bias of the press, because it favors their side on nearly every issue. The ironic part is that by making the misuse of Facebook data acceptable (even celebrated) when Obama did it, the press may have inadvertently helped Trump get elected years later. They’re upset now, but they’re just trying to put the genie that they unleashed back in the bottle. We reap what we sow.
Does yelling at your computer make it work better? (Perhaps an increasingly poor example in the age where voice commands are becoming popular.) Or figuring out what's wrong and doing what needs to be done to fix it? Gotta work with the facts on the ground, not how you think it should be. And maybe by doing so, you can move what is towards what should be.
In the case of working for user data privacy, we're working against companies that are benefiting from the data they collect and their lobbyists, as well as people who aren't aware of the situation and often only see the benefits of the apps they're using. And those people cross many demographic and political lines. I don't think user privacy is a partisan issue. It's going to be an uphill battle. You think pointing out all of the differences and disagreements of those who don't agree with you, all of the inconsistencies you see in their positions is going to help? I sincerely don't think so.
The point isn't that pointing out hypocrisy is wrong, it's that it gets in the way of your goals.
If it's more important to you to point out those inconsistencies than improve the user privacy situation, I think you have your priorities wrong. If you think you can only remedy the user privacy situation by first correcting their inconsistencies, I think that's wrong-headed and doomed to failure on both counts. But you're certainly entitled to your opinion and free to disregard mine.
Then of course terrorists from roughly the same organization tried again on the same building eight years later and it was the largest attack in US history by orders of magnitude. Terrorism proceeded to become the key societal and political issue pretty much for a whole generation.
The problem was there for a long time, the hazard was there for a long time, but it's only when we get the catastrophic outcome; e.g. the Uber car actually killed someone, the plane actually crashed, the WTC was actually destroyed, it's largely rational that that is when lots of people care. There's nothing unusual or hypocritical about it.
You might not think the outcome of this election was catastrophic but the reporters who cover the government and the white house do. They know the norms and customs that have been in place for many decades and they see that they've been ripped to shreds in just a little over a year. They know this is a catastrophe and they are rightfully trying to shine a light on every possible thing that we can get at to both patch the situation and hopefully prevent it from happening again.
Obama took data from ~200 million people ("the entire US social graph" is unambiguous). The CA incident involves ~50 million profiles. I think a difference of 150 million is "vastly more". That's not exaggeration, that's math. It was wrong in either case, but one did it on a vastly larger scale.
You can sit here splitting hairs and arguing with the specific wording of my comments and the articles backing this up, or you can say "yes, it was wrong in principle" which is what any objective person would do. Democrats and Republicans alike do bad things sometimes. Are you actually trying to defend the actions of any party involved in any of this?