Agree with this. Regardless of the politics involved, this exchange seems pretty mundane in the grand scheme of corporate emails. Taking Bosworth at face value here, it sounds like both camps got the same advice, one acted on it in full, the other didn't, the party that did saw better results, and on top of that had a better ads/targeting strategy that maximized platform ROI. If we removed the political parties from this and made them two companies, I'm not sure HN would have much of an issue with its content.

Hopefully it’s apparent to you now at least, that providing names and political affiliations to the current administration is dangerous.

> 1. they apparently gave advice to both the clinton and trump campaign

Just because this is worded ambiguously, to clarify the "they" is Facebook. CA on the other hand was effectively the Trump's digital ad campaign.

> 2. the trump campaign did targeted marketing better (ie. targeting the base rather than the marginal voter)

This ignores that a lot of what made CA different is that they used microtargeting to discourage turnout via fake news stories.

3. "I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else"

After CA's methods and actions became public, FB massively limited what you could do via their API.

FA and CA lied to users, and sent data from all the friends of users who filled out a form to CA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

If that was the advice, it seems pretty terrible.

It's not much of a stretch to see this as certain powers punishing Facebook for not having actively suppressed the Trump campaign.

> so does that mean we should be up and arms about the mamdani campaign?

No, we should be up and arms about TikTok.

I think it would be an inmensely naive and unnuanced take to look at this email and think that the truth is finally being revealed about CA.

What's going on is that this is a very early email, and it's being brought up during discovery on a current legal proceeding (and it's not necessarily the first time it's made public).

It's also clear to anyone that knows about the case that this isn't an accurate explanation of what Cambridge Analytica was doing and why it was causing concern. There's no mention of Facebook Apps unrelated to politics being used to collect user data, and there's no mention of the data being collected not only of the users that install these apps, but also their friends (which would lead to the revision of the Graph API and the implementation of minimum demographic controls).

So to me it reads like a document that Meta puts forward to prove that Zuckerberg:

- Had no idea at the time of what was going on

- Was making efforts to understand what was going on

I haven't checked which party used this document as an exhibit in an argument, although this might be available information, but I'd wager a guess that it will or has been used by Meta.

So if you are looking at this document as "the truth uncovered", I'd suggest to look for more nuance instead of easy answers.