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Cambridge Analytica gathered data to build targeted profiles and used these profiles for political advertising without informed consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Yes, but there is little evidence this had a meaningful effect on votes.
Don't think that it matters if it was effective.

There's a reason attempted murder is a crime even if it was unsuccessful

It does matter though. If you want to murder someone by hitting them with a plushie, you're not going to get charged with attempted murder because it's not possible that that would ever work. There must be justification that the choice will have the intended effect.

We should not be gung-ho to give the government more power to regulate speech.

It isn't so clear there is a reason for the crime of 'attempt', or what or how good the reason is. The Star Chamber, which cooked it up, is universally condemned as oppressive. You might say they anticipated science fiction tyranny, when they invented the world's first thought-crime: they were able to make a crime of 'conspiracy' because they imagined that the speech of the conspirators was an 'outward act'; inevitably its glorious future was e.g. to jail the left wingers in the McCarthy period.

The point of view that says 'there is a reason we punish attempts' has difficulty explaining why we punish 'success' _even more_. There is a sort of bad concience about it. The paradoxes are discussed in a characteristically brilliant and twisted work 'The Punishment that Leaves Something to Chance' by David Lewis, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th c. It nominally defends the law of attempt but can as well be read as a catastophically destructive parody of it. https://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Punishment_Chance.pdf

It's interesting to claim that it would be difficult to explain why we punish successful crime more. A successful murder creates more suffering (victim's friends and family), and ostensibly the loss of a productive member of society. These all seem like fairly common justifications for punishing murderers under the banner of retributive justice.
I don't think the outcome is what makes things like this potentially illegal.

You're not allowed to bribe public officials. You're not going to escape the law by arguing that the bribe didn't get you the result you wanted.

Bribes are not speech though, and advertising is.
The way the documentary never questioned their sales guys claims felt naive
Personalized psyops against voters ...
so... advertising...
That's like saying a sling is the same as an assault rifle. Yes both are weapons but scale and capabilities matter.