BREXIT DATA ALLEGATIONS
Did ‘cheating’ sway poll?
Canadian whistleblower Christopher Wylie told lawmakers that the Brexit referendum could have gone the other way if rules hadn’t been broken during the campaign.
“I think it is completely reasonable to say that there could’ve been a different outcome in the referendum if there hadn’t been, in my view, cheating,” said Wylie, a former contractor at Cambridge Analytica who is now at the heart of the Facebook scandal.
He was giving evidence to a British parliamentary committee that’s investigating allegations first reported by the Observer newspaper that information on millions of Facebook users was scooped up without their consent. Brexit campaigners have denied any wrongdoing.
Wylie previously alleged that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica used data harvested from more than 50 million Facebook users to help U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Wylie worked on Cambridge Analytica’s “information operations” in 2014 and 2015.
Wylie on Tuesday told the media committee of the British parliament that he “absolutely” believed Canadian consultant AggregateIQ drew on Cambridge Analytica’s databases for its work on the official Vote Leave campaign. The data could have been used to microtarget voters in the closely fought referendum in which 51.9 per cent of voters ultimately backed Brexit.
“I think it is incredibly reasonable to say that AIQ played a very significant role in Leave winning,” he said.
Because of the links between the two companies, Vote Leave got the “the next best thing” to Cambridge Analytica when it hired AggregateIQ, “a company that can do virtually everything that (Cambridge Analytica) can do but with a different billing name,” Wylie said.
Wylie also contradicted comments that Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix made to the committee.
“I think Nix’s comments to your committee were misleading and dishonest,” Wylie said. “It is categorically untrue that Cambridge Analytica has never used Facebook data. Facebook data and the acquisition using Aleksandr Kogan’s app was the foundational data set of the company. That’s how the algorithms were developed.”
Kogan, a Cambridge University researcher, created a personality-analysis app that was used by 270,000 Facebook users, who in turn gave the app permission to access data on themselves and their friends, ultimately exposing a network of 50 million people.
Cambridge Analytica denied Wylie’s claims on Twitter.
“No company would risk basing their core offering on illegal data. We engaged Dr. Kogan in good faith, and deleted his company’s data once we knew we had to. We’ve already certified this to Facebook.”
“Chris Wylie has misrepresented himself and the company to the committee,” Cambridge Analytica said on its website, calling his statements “false information, speculation, and completely unfounded conspiracy theories.”
It added, “The suggestion that Cambridge Analytica was somehow involved in any work done by AggregateIQ in the 2016 EU referendum is entirely false. We played no role in the U.K. referendum on EU membership.”
Wylie told the Observer that he was instrumental in founding AggregateIQ when he was the research director of SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica.
He said they shared underlying technology and worked so closely together that Cambridge Analytica staff often referred to the Canadian firm as a “department.”
AggregateIQ, based in Victoria, B.C., issued a statement saying it had never been part of Cambridge Analytica and had never signed a contract with the company. The company also said it was 100-per cent Canadian owned and operated and was never part of Cambridge Analytica or SCL.
“AggregateIQ works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions where it operates,” the company said in a statement.
“It has never knowingly been involved in any illegal activity. All work AggregateIQ does for each client is kept separate from every other client.”
Kogan has previously said he was being used “as a scapegoat” in the scandal, and that he believed he was handling the data he acquired “appropriately.”
Tuesday’s testimony comes a day after Wylie and two other former insiders presented 50 pages of documents that they said proved Vote Leave violated election finance rules during the referendum campaign.
They allege that Vote Leave circumvented spending limits by donating 625,000 pounds ($1,140,000) to the pro-Brexit student group BeLeave, then sending the money directly to AggregateIQ.
Campaign finance rules limited Vote Leave’s spending on the Brexit referendum to seven million pounds. When Vote Leave got close to that limit in the final weeks of the campaign, it made the donation to BeLeave, said Shahmir Sanni, a volunteer who helped run the grassroots student group.