Obama and the Democratic Party are, by no stretch of the imagination, far-left.

I suspect whoever had used it first would have been celebrated at the time. Every new innovation usually reveals its problems only later. Targeted ads 15 years ago were touted as being able to ensure we'd have a healthy relationship with ads, and only get ads we desired. Didn't turn out like that, did it?

If Cambridge Analytica had come along 5 years earlier in the political cycle, the Republicans would have been lauded for finding a marvellous new technique to engage the electorate, and the Democrats caught the flak for breaking democracy. Give it a couple more elections and I imagine much of the developed world will have outlawed micro-targeted political ads.

> Obama and the Democratic Party are, by no stretch of the imagination, far-left.

Indeed. My point is that social media works about equally well for both mainstream left (the Obama campaign) and mainstream right (the Trump campaign). It also works for both far-left and far-right. I know people who have been radicalized this way in both directions.

> I suspect whoever had used it first would have been celebrated at the time. [...] If Cambridge Analytica had come along 5 years earlier in the political cycle, the Republicans would have been lauded for finding a marvellous new technique to engage the electorate

I'm sorry, but this is such a naive take that I honestly don't know how to respond to it. Even as a child I was able to deduce, from the obvious editorial slant in the newspaper, that an inversion of tribal affiliations like this would never happen. I challenge you to find any article in the NYT or Guardian that paints any new election strategies by any right-wing politicians favorably.

I'm not that naive. :p

Of course it wouldn't be the NYT or Guardian reporting were the cycle at the opposite peak. It would be the Telegraph or I guess the US equivalent would be WaPo?

Partisan newspapers aren't going to forget their party inclinations, though they all have a fine track record attempting to borrow and reform any good ideas that originate on the other side of the fence.

Are you British by any chance? The UK press really is different from the US, in that you guys have newspapers with a variety of slants, from left to right, which most everyone is aware of. But in the US, the common perception is that there is a “neutral” mainstream press (NYT, WaPo, etc.). However, these papers would never ever publish anything approaching admiration for a Republican campaign.

Yes I am a Brit. From my UK perspective NYT feels distinctly Democrat leaning rather than neutral with the odd surprise opinion piece. I don't think I've ever felt them independent or neutral. WaPo somewhere between Democrat and Republican - I've never quite been sure if that's them simply unsure which horse they want to ride. Though I admit I read rather less from WaPo, and am not sure of the US Republican equivalent of The NYT, equivalent to the UK Torygraph (though they're not really that since their last change of ownership).

What I do notice distinctly, with both those and probably all US media to some extent is the degree they come onside around "national issues" and military action, often becoming distinctly non-neutral, even when it against their perceived political alignment. A tendency that is far less pronounced in the UK papers - though that is increasing.

UK media is often quite happy to lay the boot into the sitting government, even if it is "their own". Neutrality usually gets bought and made partisan (and crap) - Murdoch and Times, Lebedev and Independent. FT is probably the closest we have left, and their buyer haven't yet ruined it.

It might be somewhat collectively balanced, but I certainly wouldn't call it symmetric.

People don't realize that the Obama campaign and Cambridge Analytica were essentially doing the exact same thing. CA just didn't have explicit permission.

The bigger problem is that Facebook denied everyone else the same inside access that it proactively offered to the Obama campaign. Which is the only reason CA was doing it in the first place.

Indeed. That would be a good argument that social media, circa 2008, was biased towards the left, not against it.

I think the companies are biased to the left, especially Facebook. The benefit the right sees is as ad-buying customers, or as users of the platform.

Which isn't anything the left arguably couldn't also do.