Cambridge Analytica’s actions had real world political consequences, so yes it’s political for that reason. But another angle of the CA portion of the story is

Cambridge Analytica’s actions had real world political consequences, so yes it’s political for that reason. But another angle of the CA portion of the story is that they were ratfucking in a very effective way—such as publishing fake news about BLM activists were organizing violent rallies, then broadcasting that to likely Trump voters. In some cases they even organized BLM events with incitement to commit violence, then pushed true stories about the events that suited their narrative. In other words, CA demonstrated a tremendous vulnerability in our political dialogue to pure propaganda and dirty tricks that social media, in its algorithmic purity, was supposed to make less likely, not more. Some of the fallout of this affair will be a tremendous distrust that any provider of social media is an honest broker of what others use their services for. If my news feed is tainted by a group like CA manipulating it at the algorithm level, what hope can I have that anything I’m receiving over the Internet isn’t compromised? Maybe the stories are fake; maybe they’re true but the balance of stories is altered; maybe the facts are true-ish but slanted or selective. These are all legitimate concerns in the normal marketplace of ideas, but now we find the marketplace of ideas is deliberately compromised by malicious entities.