Data firm boasted of election role
BRITAIN: Bosses of the British company connected to an unprecedented leak of Facebook data have boasted that their data played a pivotal role in United States President Donald Trump’s election campaign, and claimed that they used ‘‘unattributable’’ methods to share negative messages about opposition candidates.
In footage filmed by Channel 4 News for an undercover expose, Andrew Nix, the suspended chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, said he met Trump ‘‘many times’’, and his company ‘‘did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting’’ for his presidential campaign.
He added: ‘‘We ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy.’’
Cambridge Analytica uses social media data on individuals to ‘‘micro-target’’ political messages playing on people’s deep fears. The company denies using the data of 50 million Facebook users, which it obtained from a researcher who broke Facebook’s terms, in its work for the Trump campaign.
It claims that it destroyed the data in 2015 when it became aware that it should not have been shared. However, sources close to the company said the company still had copies of the data as recently as last year.
In the undercover footage, Nix’s colleague Mark Turnbull said that in addition to sending positive messages under the banner of the official Trump campaign, the firm used ‘‘proxies’’ including charities and activist groups to send out negative material on rivals.
He said: ‘‘Sometimes you can use proxy organisations who are already there. You feed them. They are civil society organisations . . . Charities or activist groups, and we use them, feed them the material and they do the work... We just put information into the bloodstream to the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.’’
After the company’s executives were filmed claiming that it used front companies to operate incognito in elections around the world, Nix said in the latest footage that the company used a secret selfdestructing email system that left no trace.
Speaking on the programme, Trump’s election opponent Hillary Clinton suggested that Cambridge Analytica could have assisted Russia to spread pro-Trump, antiClinton messages and misinformation to 150 million Facebook users.
Cambridge Analytica denies any Russian connections. The Observer reported on Monday that it had seen correspondence indicating that in 2014 its executives met senior figures at Lukoil, an oil firm with links to the Kremlin, and had discussed the micro-targeting of individuals in elections.
Responding to the report, a spokesman for the company said: ‘‘Cambridge Analytica has never claimed it won the election for President Trump. This is patently absurd. We are proud of the work we did on that campaign, and have spoken in many public forums about what we consider to be our contribution.’’
Meanwhile, Facebook’s failure to safeguard privacy is being blamed in an investor lawsuit for a slump in its share price. The world’s largest social media network was sued in San Francisco federal court yesterday by shareholders in a class action who said they suffered losses after the disclosure that Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained profile information on 50 million users.
News of the improper data collection is the latest in a string of discomforting revelations about the ways in which the network may have been used to affect the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. Facebook is under fire over the proliferation of ‘‘fake news’’ on its site and Russian actors leveraging the platform for propaganda.
Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have called on Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to explain. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey has opened a civil probe, and Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen has issued a written inquiry to Facebook to answer questions about the matter.
European Union Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova plans to meet Facebook officials. She called the data misuse ‘‘horrifying, if confirmed’’ and ‘‘not acceptable’’.