Is this a reference to Cambridge Analytica? Their electoral effects were mostly dismissed.

Functionally they were used for five things:

1. Political advertising, which is what all campaigns engage in.

2. Discussions of the election by our own citizens, sometimes critical, more often an echo chamber or virtual throat stabbing contest.

3. News about the election which is free name recognition for all of the candidates the media considers worth talking about.

4. Market research by the campaigns.

5. A platform for foreign propaganda including psy-ops, which is bad and should be addressed, but not even close to bad enough to effect the outcome of an election as much as many might want to think that it did.

You can’t really pin the 2016 election on Facebook specifically since any information on there competes with any information not from there and there was a lot more not-Facebook information involved in that election, but Facebook by that point made for a nice scapegoat that nobody has any real sympathy for. Remember too that it was real Americans that actually filled in their ballots that decided the election for every single candidate on the list.