MPS reject Nix’s ‘victim’ claims

Alexander Nix, the former chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, the now shuttered political consultancy at the centre of Facebook’s data-mining scandal, told a British parliamentary panel yesterday that he and his company were ‘‘victims’’ of ‘‘ludicrous conspiracy theories’’ peddled by a jealous former employee and amplified by ‘‘global liberal media’’.

Alternately defiant, exasperated and testy, Nix said Cambridge Analytica’s targeted advertising and messaging work for Donald Trump’s successful 2016 United States presidential campaign had put ‘‘a huge target on our back’’.

Coupled with ‘‘unfounded’’ accusations that Cambridge Analytica was involved in the Brexit vote, ‘‘you have the makings of a perfect storm. You have someone people want to hate’’, Nix said.

‘‘If you’re sitting where I am right now, you’d probably feel quite victimised,’’ Nix told the House of Commons select committee investigating fake news, which had issued a summons for him to appear.

The British lawmakers charged that Nix had purposefully and repeatedly misled them when he testified in February, before the Facebook scandal broke.

Cambridge Analytica, a small and once obscure consulting and advertising firm, became the subject of investigation and condemnation after it was revealed that the company had improperly obtained the personal information of millions of Facebook users.

In early May, the company said it would cease operations and declare bankruptcy in the US and Britain. But it defended its compiling of Facebook data, saying it was being ‘‘vilified for activities that are not only legal, but also widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arenas’’.

Nix was suspended by Cambridge Analytica’s board in March after he appeared in a sensational undercover investigation by British broadcaster Channel 4, in which he boasted of the company’s prowess at running – and winning – dirty campaigns overseas, and offering to entrap opponents by bribery, extortion and honey traps employing Ukrainian sex workers.

Yesterday, Nix conceded that his portrayal of Cambridge Analytica’s alleged dark arts was ‘‘not my finest hour’’. The Channel 4 video shows Nix trying to woo a potential ‘‘client’’, who was in fact an undercover reporter.

Nix insisted his pitch was all ‘‘hyperbole’’ and that his company had never employed such tactics.

Responding to repeated questions about the Channel 4 expose, he said: ‘‘You don’t need to sit there and sully my reputation; I’ve already done that, to a worldwide audience.

‘‘Yes, it was foolish of me, and it was a well-crafted entrapment, sting, whatever you want to call it. Channel 4 got their man.’’

Channel 4 quickly issued a statement denying any entrapment or improper editing.

In addition to helping to run Trump’s campaign, Cambridge Analytica worked on a handful of elections in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Steve Bannon served as vicepresident of the firm before going to work for Trump fulltime in 2016. Investors included conservative mega-donor Robert Mercer.

In his testimony, Nix denied that his company worked on the successful Brexit referendum for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. However, a Canadian company with ties to Cambridge Analytica did work for at least two pro-brexit campaigns, according to Britain’s electoral commission.

Nix also denied he had deliberately misled the committee in February when he asserted: ‘‘We do not work with Facebook data, and we do not have Facebook data.’’

Nix explained that he meant the company was not at present working with such data. ‘‘I accept that some of my answers could have been clearer, but I assure you that I didn’t intend to mislead you,’’ he said.

Nix blamed his troubles on an ex-employee turned whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, who served as a major source for stories in The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

After working at the company for only 10 months, alongside academic Aleksandr Kogan, who initially mined the personal Facebook data, Wylie ‘‘went around America pitching his business’’, Nix said.

‘‘My point is you have an individual, claiming to be a whistleblower . . . who purports to be a protector of data sovereignty but who actually acquired a significantly larger data set than ours, and then went and tried to commercialise it in exactly the same way we did, and then spent the last two or three years getting bitter and jealous.’’

Asked about a report in the Financial Times that Nix took US$8 million out of the company before it collapsed, he at first called the article false and its facts wrong.

At the end of the day, Nix amended that assessment. ‘‘I only saw [the article] briefly before coming to the committee meeting and haven’t had a chance to consider it with my counsel,’’ he said.

– Washington Post