Tag: Cambridge Analytica

Cambridge Analytica’s Dirty Tricks Elected Trump, CEO Claims

The following article by Nico Hines was posted on the Daily Beast website March 20, 2018:

Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, claimed they used proxies in the U.S. to influence the 2016 election.

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero, The Daily Beast

LONDON—British political consultants that worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said they secretly used proxy organizations and super PACs to spread ads in the U.S. that could not be traced back to the Trump campaign.

Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was secretly recorded by undercover reporters from Channel 4 in Britain who were posing as prospective clients. “There’s no evidence, there’s no paper trail, there’s nothing,” said Nix, reassuring them that his company’s dirty tricks for his clients would never be detected. Continue reading “Cambridge Analytica’s Dirty Tricks Elected Trump, CEO Claims”

Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s collection of Facebook data, according to former employee

The following article by Craig Timberg, Karla Adam and Michael Kranish was psoted on the Washington Post website March 20, 2018:

Cambridge Analytica, a firm that ran data operations for President Trump’s 2016 campaign, was banned from Facebook on March 16. Here’s what you need to know. (Elyse Samuels, Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)

LONDON — Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed profiles of millions of American voters, a former employee of the data-science firm said Tuesday.

The 2014 effort was part of a high-tech form of voter persuasion touted by the company, which under Bannon identified and tested the power of anti-establishment messages that later would emerge as central themes in President Trump’s campaign speeches, according to Chris Wylie, who left the company at the end of that year.

Among the messages tested were “drain the swamp” and “deep state,” he said.

Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign, is now facing questions about alleged unethical practices, including charges that the firm improperly handled the data of tens of millions of Facebook users. On Tuesday, the company’s board announced that it was suspending its chief executive, Alexander Nix, after British television released secret recordings that appeared to show him talking about entrapping political opponents.

More than three years before he served as Trump’s chief political strategist, Bannon helped launch Cambridge Analytica with the financial backing of the wealthy Mercer family as part of a broader effort to create a populist power base. Earlier this year, the Mercers cut ties with Bannon after he was quoted making incendiary comments about Trump and his family.

In an interview Tuesday with The Washington Post at his lawyer’s London office, Wylie said that Bannon — while he was a top executive at Cambridge Analytica and head of Breitbart News — was deeply involved in the company’s strategy and approved spending nearly $1 million to acquire data, including Facebook profiles, in 2014.

“We had to get Bannon to approve everything at this point. Bannon was Alexander Nix’s boss,” said Wylie, who was Cambridge Analytica’s research director. “Alexander Nix didn’t have the authority to spend that much money without approval.”

Bannon, who served on the company’s board, did not respond to a request for comment. He served as vice president and secretary of Cambridge Analytica from June 2014 to August 2016, when he became chief executive of Trump’s campaign, according to his publicly filed financial disclosure. In 2017, he joined Trump in the White House as his chief strategist.

Bannon received more than $125,000 in consulting fees from Cambridge Analytica in 2016 and owned “membership units” in the company worth between $1 million and $5 million, according to his financial disclosure.

Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for comment about Bannon’s role.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie discussed the Facebook controversy in London on March 20. (Reuters)

It is unclear whether Bannon knew how Cambridge Analytica was obtaining the data, which allegedly was collected through an app that was portrayed as a tool for psychological research but was then transferred to the company.

Facebook has said that information was improperly shared and that it requested the deletion of the data in 2015. Cambridge Analytica officials said that they had done so, but Facebook said it received reports several days ago that the data was not deleted. Continue reading “Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s collection of Facebook data, according to former employee”

A data mining company allegedly used Facebook to distort users’ reality

The following article by Tracey Lien was posted on the Los Angeles Times website March 20, 2018:

Cambridge Analytica chief Alexander Nix speaks at the 2016 Concordia Summit in New York. Credit: Bryan Bedder / Getty Images for Concordia Summit

Many Facebook users rely on the social network to figure out what’s going on in the world. But what if the world Facebook shows them is wildly distorted?

That’s the question raised after a former employee of a data mining firm that worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign alleged the company used Facebook to bombard specific individuals with misinformation in hopes of swaying their political views.

The accusations raised alarm across the Atlantic on Monday, sparking an investigation into the firm, Cambridge Analytica, by the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office. In the U.S., Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter asking Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg whether the social media giant was aware of other data violations on its platform, and why it failed to take action sooner. Continue reading “A data mining company allegedly used Facebook to distort users’ reality”

How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions

The following article by Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore and Carole Cadwalladr was posted on the New York Times website March 17, 2018:

(After this story was published, Facebook came under harsh criticism from lawmakers in the United States and Britain. Read the latest.)

LONDON — As the upstart voter-profiling company Camb

Christopher Wylie, who helped found the data firm Cambridge Analytica and worked there until 2014, has described the company as an “arsenal of weapons” in a culture war. Credit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times

ridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016. Continue reading “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions”