> Obama famously used technology in his campaign, why people are surprised that the other side is using it is beyond me.

I suspect a lot of the difference in judgement is less about the tools and more about the messaging that it allowed: What CA did, quite effectively under the brand SCL Election, was dog-whistling and demotivation campaign, like “Do So” in Trinidad presented in the Big Hack.

If you can tell which one of your voters are racist, you can be a lot more blunt about what you mean by “revisit immigration policies”. People suspect that targetting allowed Trump to talk as if no one else was in the room — although, it’s not like he was very respectful in public.

One the other hand, people are likely to assume that Obama’s analytics, even if they were more detailed, where about pointing potential voters are the relevant part of his program: you are a teacher? Let’s put the promises about increasing the budget for education in bold. Veteran? Talk about red-tape at the VA. Everybody can see those, but people might not care as much. This is still targeting, probably more effective than cloak-and-dagger messaging, but it doesn’t come off as problematic.

Of course, a lot of the tools are similar: scraping Facebook Graph should be frowned upon in both cases, it wasn’t in 2008, 2012; it was in 2016, although it’s hard to see if that’s more awareness, and from whom, or partisanship.

I do think that the distinction is key, and why Facebook’s main visible effort was to make all political ads publicly visible: it avoided to let the argument about secret offensive ads fester. That might have some unintended consequences, though.

I read your supposed differences and see none. Both Democrats and Republicans harvest information voters thought was private to microtarget their message to people. The only difference seems to be you dislike the message that was then presented. But that isn't a problem with the methodology, thats a problem with the message. If your point is that Trump ran on a campaign of racism and division, fine, I'm with you on that. But the idea that the Trump campaign utilization of Cambridge Analytica was scandalous and the Obama campaign's analytic efforts that do the exact same thing is somehow above water is ridiculous.

Either harvesting people's data and using it to message to them is a problem or it isn't. The message being sent is a distinct issue.

You are correct the message being sent is the issue.

- Do you tell population a and population b contradictory things?

- Do you spread what you know is misinformation?

- Do you attempt to manipulate someone into working against their own interests. For example tricking a population whose interests and preference can best be expressed as A over B over C into voting for A so that C can win.

- Is your messaging a net harm to society? Deliberately playing up racial tensions to both sides determent for votes seems to fit the bill.

- Are you actual intents hidden because your interests are actually at odds with your target and they would act materially different if they understood your actual motivation?

The democratic usage of data appears to be primarily based on figuring out who could effectively message and the republican usage seems to be figuring out who they could manipulate and harm.

It's not that hard to see the difference.

> If your point is that Trump ran on a campaign of racism and division, fine, I'm with you on that.

What I find rather funny, were you to ask a Trump voter you'd likely hear them say the Democrats are the ones running divisive, racist campaigns, and that they've previously pioneered digital advertising in the political space only shows their pot-kettle policies in regards to the successful Trump campaign.

Your counterpoint is finely drawn. The problem is that many people say "Obama did it too!" when they're in favor of the content of Trump's messaging. The act of using finely targeted data to drive racism, hate, and falsehood is the issue - you are opposed to that, but others aren't.