Comment by shadowgovt
Comment by shadowgovt 2 days ago
Indeed. CA's impact on election outcomes was likely negligible; Antonio MartÃnez's "Chaos Monkeys" makes the case that Trump using CA was more indicative of the overall notion that Trump's team was spending money to try a bit of everything (online and offline) and the Clinton campaign wasn't. Their tactical failure was believing they could redirect the money to down-ticket races because Clinton / Trump was such an obvious matchup that they didn't need to spend to win.
What CA did show was that Facebook's statements about protecting user privacy were fundamentally incompatible with the way their API worked, so they had to shut it down because the alternative would have been to just sort of... Let it hang in the air that it wasn't hard for a third-party to build a system to completely bypass user intent in scoping their information.
(I had the misfortune of trying to write a Facebook app about fifteen years prior, and that was my takeaway at the time also... "Do people, like, realize that their whole process for protecting scraping the social network via third-party app integration is the honor system?" Turns out people didn't).
> Do people, like, realize that their whole process for protecting scraping the social network via third-party app integration is the honor system?
That sentiment goes back pretty far in Facebook's history
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-branded-early-fac...