No, it's fundamentally different and worse, because there's no indication it's happening at all. There's no possibility to mount any kind of defense of rebuttal. To use your war analogy, it's as if someone suddenly invented invisibility cloaks.
The fact that we don't have much evidence about what Cambridge Analytica did is the whole problem.
Re:We all wear tinfoil hats now
by mistermann on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @09:33AM
(#22474724)
That seemingly no one, even smart people, cares that there's little evidence is also a big problem. People want it to be true.
Now how many votes are changed due to the media's overwhelming (90%+) negativity about Brexit and Trump? If CA swayed any votes at all, then our media is actively and aggressively engaging in much worse. To use an analogy, CA might have been a car bomb, but the ongoing bias in the media is a continuous artillery shelling of the public's perception of politics.