This is hardly news. You can sway a democratic election, by definition, by changing the opinion of the median voter. Which means political campaigns focus their

This is hardly news. You can sway a democratic election, by definition, by changing the opinion of the median voter. Which means political campaigns focus their energy on the median voter. And targeted advertising makes it easier and more efficient to do that. So what? This doesn't change the end result, that the person who gets elected is close to the median opinion in the country. It doesn't give you a way to elect an extremist that 90% of the country disagree with. It's also a mechanism that is equally available to all candidates. It is not as if only Republicans can run advertising on social media. In fact, I recall a bunch of fawning praise in the media and tech sphere for the 2008 Obama campaign's use of social media, and much prognostication that the old farts in the Republican party would be consigned to political oblivion because they wouldn't be able to master the use of big data and social media to precisely target their spending and efforts to win elections. At the time no one in the media seemed to consider this future the end of democracy - that's only a complaint that comes up when the Republicans use this technique to win, apparently.