There are three big takeaways here. The first one goes well beyond Trump's election as president. Folks have been warning about this for years, but clearly we have created something of a monster in the rise of social media. Make no mistake: There are many positives you can attribute to sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram: reconnecting with friends from yesteryear, getting information about news or sports in real time, or launching powerful social movements. But at the end of the day, a capitalist company such as Facebook and its billionaire founder Zuckerberg have gotten rich by exploiting the essence of our humanity — our friendships and even our personalities — for profit. The Trump-Cambridge Analytica scandal is a two-lane highway to hell — your intimate personal data flowing north to shady operators, then flowing back south as divisive negative politics or even "fake news." That's an existential threat not just to democracy but to a broader civil society.