I often wonder if any of this “age of post-truth” stuff would have become popular had the election gone the other way.
It’s nothing new - philosophers and media theorists have been writing about media manipulation for the past century or more. But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.
> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.
The only difference is that at the time it was heralded as being technologically savvy because it produced results that the media and tech companies desired.
I'm not sure if you're arguing in bad faith or you misunderstand how either the Obama app or how Cambridge Analytical got their data.
Obama's app was advertised as an app for the Obama campaign. People who used the app consented that the Obama campaign would get access to data about them and their friends. For better or worse (better for marketers, worse for the friends of these app users), this was all within how Facebook was expected to work.
Cambridge Analytica obtained similar data, but in a different way by breaking Facebook's TOS. A developer made an app, advertised as some kind of quiz, never saying that the data would be handed over to CA. Not only was the app developer not being up front about what the data would be used for, but they also broke FB's TOS [0] with its usage.
Plainly, there are key differences here beyond how it was heralded at the time (and it should be noted that even the article your provided shows Obama's data collection in both a positive and negative light).
> People who used the app consented that the Obama campaign would get access to data about them and their friends. For better or worse (better for marketers, worse for the friends of these app users), this was all within how Facebook was expected to work.
I see no material difference here. People shared their data and it was used accordingly. This is how Facebook is expected to work. It's not like the Obama app had a big button that said "upload your friends list to Obama's database!". That was covertly done behind the scenes.
Irregardless, all Facebook users should assume all of their data is being sold and sliced and diced a million different ways.
The main point here is that the media has tried to turn CA in to a scandal while they very much did not do that for very similar actions Obama was taking.
You are misunderstanding, in that the person you are commenting on isn't referring to their data collection techniques. The point is that, once the data was obtained, both of the campaigns used it for microtargeting. The only difference, as you pointed out, is that CA obtained their data in a way that broke the TOS. But whenever the "scandal" is discussed, it almost entirely focuses on the fact that CA/the Trump campaign was targeting voters with propoganda and manipulating their opinions. Yet, in that aspect, the Obama campaign was no different, but it receives a pass.
Obama's app was only ever installed on peoples devices that wanted it.
it was in effect preaching to the converted.
CA deliberately harvested people that were not politically involved and dissafected and whipped them into a fuhrer, and thats just how they got started and doesn't cover the outright lies they pushed and farmed.
> I often wonder if any of this “age of post-truth” stuff would have become popular had the election gone the other way.
That probably depends how and why it went the other way, just like it probably wouldn't have the same degree of currency if Trump had won but there hadn't been a widely-reported on pro-Trump propaganda campaign apparently separate from the official campaign that was being compared to the Russian military propaganda technique referred to in a RAND analysis as the “firehose of falsehoods” even before any actual suggestion of Russian support for Trump or collusion between the campaign and Russia was publicly made.
> But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.
Like many politically convenient narratives, yours only works of you ignore the facts, in this case specifically that the media narrative you suggest was constructed as a necessary explanation for the media’s missed prediction of the election results was prominent in the media in relation to the election as far back as the primary campaign (and actually had been a factor in US political coverage, though prior to the evidence of the propaganda campaign referred to earlier, one whose prominence had faded significantly since the end of the second Bush Administration, since Rove's derisive “reality-based community” comment in 2004.)
As far as I know, the consequences of any “propaganda campaign” were minor. Assuming they did happen and considering that the election was very close, then sure, an argument could be made that they ultimately determined the election.
But that isn’t your argument, or at least what I’m interpreting to be your argument (your last paragraph is a single run-on sentence and it’s quite hard to understand.)
If the media weren’t completely wrong, they would have predicted a close race. Instead, they overwhelmingly showed Trump losing by a significant margin. Hence my point: the mainstream media messed up, big time, and instead of acknowledging it, they’ve embarked on a campaign to find a nefarious reason for the entirety of the events, when in reality the cause of election results are far more mundane and have more to do with economics.
> As far as I know, the consequences of any “propaganda campaign” were minor
Tracing causality in a single election is basically impossible for phenomena which aren't very similar to those in previous elections for which there is a solid base across many examples with many variations in alternative factors that themselves are well understood to provide controls. But the effects of the campaign aren't what drove the narrative of the post-truth era, it's existence which was a major media story starting fairly early in the campaign, and the absence of any disavowal of it was.
> If the media weren’t completely wrong, they would have predicted a close race
They predicted a race about as close as it was. They also (in many but not all cases) predicted a near certainty of a Clinton victory, because, as 538 pointed out before the election in explaining why their predictions were different and showed a much lower probability of Clinton winning than other media models, many models assumed that any poll-vs-vote differences would be independent between the states, while historically polling error is strongly correlated between the states.
> Hence my point: the mainstream media messed up, big time, and instead of acknowledging it, they’ve embarked on a campaign to find a nefarious reason for the entirety of the events
But, again, this claim doesn't work because (1) the media found the “explanation” before the events, and (2) no one except those trying to discredit the story describes it as explaining “the entirety of events”.
> in reality the cause of election results are far more mundane and have more to do with economics.
This is just as much of a self-serving and fact-ignoring explanation of the “entirety of events” as the propaganda as the narrative you are complaining about would be if anyone offered it for that purpose, the difference between yours and the other one is that no one—not even the center-right Democratic establishment, who has the most to gain from getting people to believe that story—offers the other narrative for that purpose.
It’s nothing new - philosophers and media theorists have been writing about media manipulation for the past century or more. But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.