It's possible that despite capturing Facebook data on 50 million people, Cambridge Analytica didn't actually accomplish anything noteworthy in the realm of politics. At the center of the company's claim to significance is a technique for turning people's Facebook "likes" into psychological profiles, and a further claim that these profiles rendered victims vulnerable to manipulation.
But scientific papers used to back those claims leave doubt as to whether the company's technique was likely to work as advertised.
It sounds chilling. Quoted in The Guardian, ex-employee Christopher Wyle called the company's technique "psychological warfare." The idea, as Wyle described it, was to target people with political ads "designed to work on their particular psychological makeup."