I thought the issue was that foreign actors were able to use Facebook to push for their candidate of choice, not that Trump was "unapproved" (why do you use quotes? that phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the comment you're responding to).

I don't believe for a second that this much fuss would have been made over this issue if Trump had lost the election. Some law enforcement action may have been taken, but it wouldn't have been front page news. The reason for my quotes is that Trump is "unapproved" which is the explanation for the scale of the reaction. I don't particularly approve of him either, but considering the real motivations of the people writing regulation is important.

Of course there wouldn't be as much fuss about it. Trump losing the election would imply that the attempts at influencing people were unsuccessful. At a glance, that would indicate that regulation is unnecessary (though detailed analysis could show otherwise).

Foreign spending on political FB ads was a drop in the ocean. Especially when you consider it played to both sides (acknowledge it leaned towards Trump), was not all in swing states, and a lot of it was after the election. This is almost certainly not about them.

So, in other words, only regulate to prevent challengers. This is precisely what Facebook and the political establishment hope to achieve.

Why is it important that Facebook was the medium? Zuck just done saying that they identified 400-500 Russian accounts the were politically active. The "unapproved" in quotes part there is that these are Russians.

Simultaneously, there were tens of thousands of foreign nationals demonstrating in the streets of major cities all over the country, and this is "approved." This is why I'm left wondering: what are we after?

> foreign actors

First it's Russia and now it's Cambridge Analytica. Unless you can trace CA's business activities to foreign hires or somehow devaluing the influence of the former for the latter, even though the Russian angle was what was being pushed around for a good while as The Reason Trump became so favoured (rather than actual failures of the Democratic party!), methinks it's just the alphabet agencies and co. looking for excuses.

This was all happening at the time when Obama was over in France campaigning for his preferred candidate. Why is that not considered equally improper?