[frabcus]

Yes, though to explain swinging a referendum (or a single state in a US election), you don't need mind control.

Facebook ran an experiment in 2010 showing they can get out the vote via the news feed:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-facebook...

All an advertiser needs to do is have a way of targetting who they want to get out and vote, and get that to happen.

It seems at least possible this happened with the 2016 EU referendum in the UK, and was one of a bunch of factors which swung the result - Dominic Cummings, who ran one of the campaigns, certainly claims that it significantly helped (search for digital in https://beta.spectator.co.uk/article/dominic-cummings-how-th...).

I'm reasonably sure they were using ML to work out a set of factors for who voted which way on the referendum from other data (answers to the Euro football contest), then targetted ads at those factors. It was pretty clever.