Talking to people using their social media profiles, while identifying yourself as from a political campaign, is worlds away from what Cambridge Analytica are doing: which is not remotely open or honest.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-03-14/the-secre...
>One way the campaign sought to identify the ripest targets was through a series of what the Analyst Institute called “experiment-informed programs,” or EIPs, designed to measure how effective different types of messages were at moving public opinion.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/508836/how-obama-used-big...
>Among the insights that were shared are the fact the people like conform to social norms, both in their community and their own past behavior. So telling voters that their neighbors have already voted or reminding them about their previous support of a candidate, makes those voters more likely to take action.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/meet-ps...
>The real drivers of an effective social media campaign, however, are based on the psychology of social behaviors not the current technology.
http://mprcenter.org/blog/2013/01/how-obama-won-the-social-m...