To quote Abe Simpson, "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you..."

Facebook late 2000s was a very utopian vision of the social graph with Obama staffers bragging about the same tactics that were demonized by Cambridge Analytica. If anything, Facebook was more evil because of the data leakage then. The way that they made money then was still ads.

as a FB sceptic and part of a Berkeley data science community, I visited FB on a group tour, in the first weeks of opening the Menlo Park Campus. We were told explicitly, with a ten meter wide screen in the back, that any analytics could run on their Map-Reduce stack for pay. The example was "people who bowl in the Minneapolis area" or something. Some nod to political or sexual extensions to that was implied but not explained. "You can run your code jobs on this data. We have customers now" the spokesperson announced to the Berkeley data science crowd of about 45 people. I regret not recording it on video.

Much later, after personally running away from anything FB, this Cambridge Analytica scandal happened, and a picture of Zuck and wife walking with the King of Spain was publicized, and a picture of FB COO Cheryl Sandberg on a tour of a US Aircraft carrier and the fleet admiral in dress uniform was publicized -- I do not know how these transitions were managed socially but ... ?? How could anyone not see this?

ugly, creepy.. against the whole FB consolidation here, from Day Zero.

They weren't making money, were they?

I guess it depends what you mean by Evil. Force-pushing ads and sharing updates about people you don't know because it could keep you connected so that you could see more ads, made them profitable. A free service that doesn't push ads can't be.