Indeed. Based on the adverts I am shown, Facebook thinks I'm a meat loving American from Florida who moved to the town of Waterlooville in the UK, who enjoys gambling on horse races, owns a dog, and works in graphic design; when I am actually a vegetarian Brit who moved to Berlin, is bored by spectator sports, who has never owned any pet, and who works as a software developer.

Whoever paid money to show me those ads, wasted it.

You don't even notice the advertisements that affect you....

add to the fact that people vehemently deny it when it is pointed out.

"I'm not addicted. I can stop at any time"

The fact that there are so many people re-posting/sharing and joining telegram groups pretty much shows how it's effective. The fact that some of the "proof" from some of these hard core believers is directly the content from these spammers also shows its effectiveness.

I think there's plenty of evidence that counters your claim.

If social media engagement corresponded to real changes, Kony would be behind bars. :-) That's why "twitter metrics" are such a perfect closed system; they're already optimized for engagement so of course their content engages the people observing the metrics.

Naïve perspective. Those as campaigns you see are probably designed by some expensive tech company that hires people with good resumes and bad skills to fleece their customers. Maybe I’m wrong and you’re caught in the dragnet of good campaigns that somehow can’t figure out targeting despite all the creepy tools at their disposal.

The thing is, people did not have the option on voting "What to do with Kony?" Whereas with elections they have a real, actionable thing that they were going to engage this anyway. The activation energy is much lower for this.

There are lots of things going on here, I'd be careful about being too dismissive about this.

You should look up how the Cambridge Analytica scandal influenced the 2016 presidential election and all the stuff that came up during the congressional hearings. It is highly likely that Trump won because of it. They not only used the leaked facebook data from 70 million americans to build models of who was voting for who, they also used it for targeted ads. For example, they knew that people from certain groups were highly unlikely to ever vote for Trump, no matter how many propaganda ads they were fed. But they didn't let all the personal data they had go to waste. They instead showed these people "news" articles via ads about Clinton and her alleged weakness, or her husband's infidelity. This way they made people who would have otherwise opposed Trump simply not vote at all. The rest is history.

Obviously, things don't always go to plan.

what do you mean. he is out of office

That is not meddling that is informing your foreign partners about your official position. And, shockingly, friendly government are treated different than hostile ones.