The suspended chief executive of Cambridge Analytica said in a secretly recorded video broadcast on Tuesday that his UK-based political consultancy’s online campaign played a decisive role in U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory.
CEO Alexander Nix’s comments, which could not be verified, are potentially a further problem for Facebook Inc as it faces lawmakers’ scrutiny in the United States and Europe over Cambridge Analytica’s improper use of 50 million users’ personal data to target voters.
In a separate reprt, The Guardian stated that it had obtained a 27-page long blueprint from Cambridge Analytica, revealing how it used Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to help Trump win the White House.
According to The Guardian report, intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were put into play to target the 10,000 different ads that would cater to different audiences, in the months before the election.
Nix too had described the “questionable practices” used to influence foreign elections and said his firm did all the research, analytics and targeting of voters for Trump’s digital and TV campaigns.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie told the Washington Post on Tuesday that in 2014 conservative strategist Steve Bannon, who went on to be Trump's White House adviser, oversaw the firm's early efforts to collect Facebook data to build detailed profiles on millions of American voters.
Bannon, who served on the company’s board, had approved spending nearly $1 million to acquire data, including Facebook profiles, in 2014, Wylie told the Post. It is unclear whether Bannon knew how Cambridge Analytica was obtaining the Facebook data, the Post reported.
According to The Guardian, when Cambridge Analytica had first joined Trump’s campaign in June, 2016, the various techniques of collecting data and using social media to target ads at audiences, none of which are legal, were not accessible to the then Presidential candidate.
Some of these included using the entire Youtube masthead to market some real estate on election day, after receiving information about the voters from the company’s data collection, The Guardian reports.
The report adds that ads on Facebook, Twitter, Google and music-sharing app Pandora were also used to help direct 35,000 supporters to install an app used by the most active supporters. It also used the new advertising techniques introduced by both Twitter and Snapchat.
However, the document states, when the company joined Trump’s campaign, the campaign had “no speakable data infrastructure” and “no unifying data, digital and tech strategy”, The Guardian report adds.
Now, US law bans foreigners from making contributions or spending money on behalf of election campaigns but it was not illegal for the Trump campaign to retain Cambridge Analytica’s services, according to Bradley Smith, a former Republican member of the US Federal Election Commission.
The fact that they are a British company doesn’t add anything to the analysis unless they were giving their services away for free or charging below-market rates.Bradley Smith, a former Republican member of the US Federal EC told Reuters
US Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, had called on Tuesday for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify in Congress. Zuckerberg had later uploaded a post on his Facebook profile- apologizing to the masses about the data breach and promising that the company would take great care for it to not be repeated.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting a long-term investigation of alleged Russian interference in U.S. politics and a detailed examination of U.S. election security precautions, would carry out its own inquiry of Cambridge Analytica, a Congressional official with direct knowledge of the investigation said.
The White House said it welcomed inquiries, and that the President believes that Americans’ privacy should be protected.
(With inputs from Reuters and The Guardian)
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