Yes, it’s not new to manipulate people, the low cost for high efficiency is new. Clinton had almost 3M more votes than Trump.
It would be much more expensive to manipulate 3M (1% us population, 1.2% voters), rather than 70k (0.02% pop, 0.028% voters).
If winning the election is about properly manipulating 0.04% of the voters, that’s very scary and not working as initially designed.
Edit:math