> To me that is what makes this whole "we scraped data and stole the election for trump" narrative seem extremely suspicious.

Suspicious of what? Be more clear about what you're trying to say here please.

Because I hope it's not that people didn't complain enough when Obama did it, and therefore now nobody can? (aside from the fact that I did complain, because I complain about all advertising, but that's not the point)

The first one links to NYTimes Blog though. I mean now you see on general news coverage about cellphone chip companies -- absolutely uninteresting 10 years ago. Apparently voters were already manipulated to some degree at that time. But now it got even more. But at the same time technology immersed to much into day to day life that everybody is also interested in pure technology news.

On the other hand all journalists become more technical at the same time, so they have to digest some stuff from the past. Obviously even older news...

I guess it's fair to say that Techcrunch or ZDNet are not exactly great sources for usage of Big Data in politics...