By Brian Flood, Fox News
The left is outraged that President Trump’s campaign used data mining to win the 2016 election – but neither the media nor Democrats seemed to mind when President Obama’s team did the same thing.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro penned a column for The Hill on Tuesday headlined, “What’s genius for Obama is scandal when it comes to Trump,” which outlined the differences in the way similar news was covered during contrasting administrations.
Shapiro surfaced a 2012 report from The Guardian that proclaimed Obama’s reelection team was mining data through Facebook to target specific voters. The Guardian is also the publication that reported on political data analytics company Cambridge Analytica and its ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Cambridge Analytica is accused of harvesting data to build profiles on 50 million Facebook users, who agreed to fill out a survey, in an attempt to help Team Trump target specific voters with ads and stories.
Shapiro noted that Facebook didn’t object when Obama’s team used tactics similar to what Trump’s campaign employed, noting that a former Obama campaign staffer recently admitted Facebook didn’t try to stop Obama’s 2012 re-election team because the company wanted him to win.
Obama’s campaign built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API, according to the Washington Post. This technology allowed the Obama campaign to access information of voters to figure out “which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote,” according to the paper.
“Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing,” ex-Obama campaign staffer Carol Davidsen tweeted on Sunday from her verified account.
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