U.S. and British lawmakers demand explanation

The Canadian who blew the whistle on an alleged propaganda scheme using a data mining breach at Facebook says it “took fake news to the next level.”

Chris Wylie said the data from Facebook — gleaned from 50 million people without their knowledge — was then used to change people’s perceptions.

“I feel a sense of regret every day when I see where they have helped take our world,” said Wylie, from British Columbia.

U.S. and British lawmakers are demanding that Facebook explain how the political data firm Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without the social network alerting users. Canada’s privacy commissioner is demanding to know whether any Canadians had personal information compromised.

The furor caused Facebook to lose US$36 billion in value Monday with CEO Mark Zuckerberg suffering a personal loss of US$4.9 billion.

Cambridge Analytica was used by Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign. The U.K. company earned US$5.9 million in 2016 from the Trump campaign, according to data from the Federal Election Commission.

Cambridge has been largely funded by Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and Steve Bannon, a former adviser to the president.

Wylie, a Cambridge cofounder who left in 2014, said he did not know to what extent Trump’s campaign used the techniques, but he said Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was meeting with Cambridge Analytica in 2015, before Trump even announced his run for office.

Cambridge Analytica is also under scrutiny for its propaganda practices and how it used the Facebook data.

Britain’s information commissioner says she will apply for a warrant to access the servers of the company. Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said the firm had been “unco-operative” in her investigation of whether Facebook data was “illegally acquired and used.”

The firm faced more controversy Monday after senior executives were filmed saying they could entrap politicians with bribes and Ukrainian prostitutes.

In an undercover investigation filmed by Britain’s Channel 4 News, Alexander Nix, the firm’s chief executive, claimed the company had worked in more than 200 elections across the world, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India and Argentina.

Politicians could be bribed or compromised by sending “some girls around to the candidates house.” Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well,” said Nix on the video recording.

In the investigation, Mark Turnbull, the managing director of CA Political Global, said Cambridge Analytica could then discreetly push the compromising material on to social media and the internet.

“We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again … like a remote control,” said Turnbull.

A Cambridge Analytica spokesman told Channel 4 News, “We entirely refute any allegation that Cambridge Analytica or any of its affiliates use entrapment, bribes, or so-called ‘honeytraps’ for any purpose whatsoever.”

Nix told BBC’s Newsnight, “A lot of the allegations that have been put to Cambridge are entirely unfounded and extremely unfair.”

But U.K. Culture Secretary Matt Hancock was met with cheers in Parliament when he said that the “Wild West” days of “digital companies who flout rules and think that the best thing to do is to move fast and break things without respect for the impact that has on democracy and on society” were over.

In a statement Sunday, Wylie, 28, described himself as “a curious and naive 23-year-old,” when he first went to work for Analytica.

It was his information about the firm’s methods that were used by The New York Times and Britain’s Observer to alert the world to the Facebook breach over the weekend.

“I do feel responsible for it and it’s something that I regret,” Wylie says in a video interview posted on The Observer’s web page.

“It was a grossly unethical experiment because you are playing with an entire country, the psychology of an entire country, without their consent or awareness.”

In an interview Monday on NBC’s Today Wylie said Cambridge Analytica secured personal data in order to learn about individuals and then used it to create an information cocoon to change their perceptions.

“This is based on an idea called ’informational dominance,’ which is the idea that if you can capture every channel of information around a person and then inject content around them, you can change their perception of what’s actually happening,” Wylie said.

“This is a company that really took fake news to the next level.”

“It’s a full-service propaganda machine,“he said of Cambridge Analytica.

On Saturday, Trump’s campaign denied using the firm’s data, saying it relied on the Republican National Committee for its information.

In a statement Monday, Cambridge Analytica “strongly denied” the allegations that it had improperly obtained Facebook data. It also denied that the Facebook data was used by the Trump campaign.

Facebook has denied the data collection was a breach because people knowingly provided their information. The company has said University of Cambridge psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan accessed the information after he requested it from users who gave their consent when they chose to sign up for a test via a new Facebook app.

Kogan ultimately provided more than 50 million raw profiles to Cambridge Analytica, said Wylie.

Facebook said it had hired a digital forensics firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Cambridge Analytica to determine if the Facebook data the company collected still existed or if it had been destroyed.

Meanwhile, The Canadian Press reported Monday that years ago, Wylie worked in the office of former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. Wylie had already begun to develop strategies on how politicians could capitalize on data collected through social media, said a former senior Liberal insider who spoke on condition of anonymity.

At the time, the idea was viewed as too invasive and raised concerns with the Liberals, who declined to have anything to do with it, the insider told CP. Wylie’s recommended data-collection approach spooked party officials to the point that it became an significant factor behind their decision not to renew his contract in 2009.

“Let’s say he had boundary issues on data even back then,” said the insider, who noted that Wylie’s descriptions of his methods in media reports sounded familiar.

“He effectively pitched an earlier version of exactly this to us back in 2009 and we said, ‘No.’ ”