The point is that Facebook ads, regardless of how precisely targeted they may (or may not) have been, did not sway the 2016 election, and I am not aware of any other election Facebook is even thought to have had any effect on. The whole “it’s Facebook’s fault” narrative was shaped by a liberal media desperate to explain why they were unsuccessful in influencing it themselves. Rather than accept the fact that they had simply a run a fatally flawed candidate, and had alienated large swaths of the country by calling them stupid for not agreeing with every one of their views, liberals found a scapegoat: it was Facebook’s fault.

Facebook is an echo chamber. People don’t go there to be informed; they go there to validate their already held beliefs. Given the large ideological chasm between the two candidates in the 2016 election, it defies logic that even a single voter was swayed or chose not to vote at all based on ads they saw on Facebook.

Having lost the popular vote, but winning the presidency with a margin of 77,744 votes in specific locations, it is not hard to imagine that Trump's success could have been thanks to carefully targeted political ads.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-elect...

Of course it's impossible to say whether Trump would have won even if he hadn't spent any money on Facebook ads, but we're talking about a campaign that spent hundreds of millions of dollars in total. If this amount of money doesn't include enough to influence 78k people to go out and vote for a specific candidate, then we might as well give up on the very concept of advertising.