I do adhere to the view that wrong is wrong even when others do it, but I'd like a better look into the big data fantasy of the past decade, and that includes a deeper look into the times when this social/data/analytics/targeting bonanza seemed sweet because the teams who were more adept at it were not associated with people or institutions one abhors.
Whataboutism taints conversations when it's an excuse; other kinds of excuses also shut down conversations that should be had.
More plainly, the CA approach to starting the graph was nauseatingly scammy, but how many friends of Obama supporters (and perhaps Clinton - the API changed before the campaign, but maybe some data persisted with the DNC) were aware that their data was being processed by political parties?
Interesting how whataboutism became a common use term recently -- when people started pointing out hypocrisy, suddenly we care about whataboutism?
Hypocrisy is what I care about and there's enough of it to repave the entire Interstate system. When someone criticized Obama or Democrats, the first words in response was some variation of "Bush..." Blame Bush was a competitive sport. Whatabout that?
In its original incarnation it was not so bad. If one criticizes the Russian government for their low-level corruption and it responds with "but you are lynching negroes", that is basically irrelevant and does not invalidate the criticism and one can categorize the response as whataboutism to disregard it.
But it is disingenuous to use it to disregard others who point out hypocrisy. If you want others not to use a useful strategy, you can't use it yourself and then whine when they respond in kind, telling them they should stop without making any assurances that you yourself will. It's like telling someone they should only fight with fists while you're wearing brass knuckles.
Say targeted advertising is like a nuke. If you complain when your enemy drops a nuke on you, but not when you drop a nuke on them, your problem is obviously not with nukes, just with your enemies dropping them on you.
This whole media campaign against Facebook is aimed to prevent something like Trump 2016 from ever happening again by denying the people who [i]shouldn't win[/i] modern tools. It has nothing to do with privacy.
