Explain the difference in semantics between the two because the mechanics sound the same, best I can tell this company was just running ads like everyone else. Creating psychological profiles of voters to craft messages to them to pursuade their vote I believe is the same thing as political advertising and is exactly what Obama's campaign were doing and had countless fawning articles written about them (just Google it.) Best I can tell the real facet here being used to paint this in a new light is the use of harvested data in a way that violated Facebook ToS but that is 100% nothing new and crawling FB via the API to do data science was a new idea like 10+ years ago (and it has since been locked down due to the prevalence of abuse I'd assume.)