Give me a break. All politicians put ads on Facebook. Surprising I know but Clinton put ads on Facebook too. Obama puts ads on Facebook, he gets marketing awards. Trump does the same thing and suddenly it’s armageddon and the Russians are coming.

> Trump does the same thing and suddenly it’s armageddon and the Russians are coming.

I think the complaints about Trump's 2016 campaign are that:

1. There's an important difference between Americans spending money to influence an American election and Russians (secretly) spending money to influence an American election. (Alternatively/additionally, Russia hacked computers and used that illegally obtained data to influence the American election).

2. When targeting ads, there's a difference between using data that voters willingly give your campaign and data that was disingenuously collected about people (e.g. Cambridge Analytica's infamous "5,000 data points on every American"[0]).

The extent to which either of these things happened is subject to debate, as is the extent to which either of them changed the outcome of the election.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/what-did-cambridge-analytica-rea...