[beerandt]

It might be somewhat collectively balanced, but I certainly wouldn't call it symmetric.

People don't realize that the Obama campaign and Cambridge Analytica were essentially doing the exact same thing. CA just didn't have explicit permission.

The bigger problem is that Facebook denied everyone else the same inside access that it proactively offered to the Obama campaign. Which is the only reason CA was doing it in the first place.

[knzhou]

Indeed. That would be a good argument that social media, circa 2008, was biased towards the left, not against it.

[beerandt]

I think the companies are biased to the left, especially Facebook. The benefit the right sees is as ad-buying customers, or as users of the platform.

Which isn't anything the left arguably couldn't also do.