Yes, that is exactly it. You seem to assume that the only way you can achieve this is by advertising to individual people by Facebook ID's and use this as the basis of your argument that the whole story is fraudulent and instead there is some media conspiracy to commit securities fraud.
Can you see where your logic might be faulty?
There is a lot of information at your fingertips about how they actually used the data, you can go to your favorite search engine right now, type in "how did cambridge analytica use the facebook data" and read the answer. I'd do this first before calling the whole thing bogus and accusing Channel 4 of committing securities fraud.
So yes, the story is fraudulent. The (years old) data that Kogan scraped and sold to CA years after the fact could possibly be used in aggregate to formulate campaign strategy (although because of its age even that use wouldn’t have been very effective). It couldn’t be used to target specific individuals or anything resembling that. If you’re saying they were able to target zip codes heavily populated by people in a given political party sure, they could. But that’s not remotely close to what is being described in the articles.
Also, since you and your friends at the Guardian are implying that they used this data in other ways, see here:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17138854/cambridge-analyt...
Even that part of your/their narrative is inaccurate.
None of this implies in any way that they even took out a Facebook advert (in fact they preferred content that looked organic, seeded through various Facebook groups/Twitter accounts), so I'm not sure why your experience with using the Facebook self-serve advertising portal gives much insight here.
In short: they used the dataset to target people, but they did not specifically target people in the dataset.
1. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research
