What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Apparently until it comes to politics.  President Obama‘s campaign for re-election cleverly utilized the ENTIRE Facebook social network, utilizing information that was not available to the Republicans because they had not developed the appropriate app for gathering that information. Perhaps unfair, but regarded by the media (and certainly by me) as excessively clever.  Details of Ms. Davidsen’s approach can be heard directly starting at 18.5 minutes into her presentation, to be found at https://heavy.com/news/2018/03/carol-davidsen-obama-facebook-tweets-davidson/.

Carol Davidsen: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know heavy.com Carol Davidsen, a former Obama campaign official, wrote controversial tweets in which she says Facebook was “on our side.”

That same uneven distribution of data and unfair advantage for the Democrats would have been carried into the last Presidential election as well, once again giving them the upper hand.  So much for the goose. Now for the gander, which has the left-leaning media in hysterics and full attack mode. It turns out that candidate Trump, for whom as President over 90% of  reporting remains negative (often viciously so), also utilized Facebook-mined data for his campaign.  Rather than the entire Facebook social network, previously available to and utilized by the Democrats for data mining,  candidate Trump utilized a 50 million sample compiled through a company called Cambridge Analytica.  Trump’s utiization would seem to be a much more efficient use of resources.  Instead of being heralded for the cleverness of its role and the efficiency of its data utilization, everything bad about this company (and undercover reporting is consistent with some operations that are clearly bad) is now being used to trash its every operation. Cambridge Analytica has become such a whipping boy of the press that finding a rational discussion of what they did can be difficult. The following appears to be such a discussion: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win

Our world has clearly changed. A slightly different perspective on this same topic is given by: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2018/03/21/liberal-media-didn-t-think-data-mining-was-so-bad-when-obama-s-campaign-did-it.html

Liberal media didn’t think data mining was so bad when Obama’s campaign did it www.foxnews.com Liberal lawmakers and media members have pushed a narrative that President Trump’s campaign used data mining to win the 2016 election – but nobody seemed to mind …

*** Gary A. Howie MSc, PhD *** is  business owner/rancher and a Life & Liberty News contributor