For future reference: Don’t use 3rd-party scraping tools on your social media accounts. They will generate thousands of API requests and trigger bot detection. You obviously didn’t intend for this to happen, but from the company’s perspective it’s equivalent to bot/scraper abuse.
It's important to note that LinkedIn got taken to court over blocking a company from scraping. They lost. They may won in appeal but considering the whole what is public is public approach from the courts I doubt they will have. The clause in tos saying you can't scrape isn't valid
And no, they can't sell it to whoever they want (or at least that's a reduction of how Facebook and Google use your data). They do monetize the data with their internal advertising platforms that they sell to people like OP, rather than letting anyone monetize the data without the knowledge or consent of their users.
That would be a step too far in privacy invasion? How convenient Facebook cares about privacy exactly when it's in their financial interest, and even more convenient all their users draw the exact same line.
For example, if you scraped tinder profiles and published a map of all tinder users in a city most would agree that’s a privacy invasion.
The only way to balance the desire of users to make some data public and prevent anyone from grabbing all of it forever is to ban people from using automated tools.
Plus users agreed to tech giants' terms of service (it is a different story that almost no-one reads them and have any understanding of them in the real sense) whereas users did not agree to OP using some tool to scrape their data.
Maybe this is not fair but it is how things are
We do not know what the 3rd party software does or how it does it.
> Then we used a program to analyze our followers
This suggests it does way more than post.