Palace denies Cambridge Analytica role in Duterte's landslide victory

MALACAÑANG on Tuesday, April 10, denied that British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica played a key role in the landslide victory of President Rodrigo Duterte in the 2016 elections.

Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque Jr. said Duterte, who was then Davao City mayor, won “fair and square” because of the “trust and confidence” of over 16 million Filipinos.

Roque cited Duterte’s then campaign finance manager, now Finance Secretary, Carlos Dominguez III, who said that no money was spent to seek advice from Cambridge Analytica.

“The Secretary of Finance, in his capacity as treasurer of the PRRD campaign, assures that he did not pay anything to Cam

bridge Analytica nor did he transact with them,” he said.

Roque said there was no need for Duterte to seek help from the Cambridge Analytica to win the 2016 elections, as insinuated by a report published in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.

“The President won the election fair and square with an overwhelming mandate of over 16 million votes and a margin of over six million. Support for the former Davao city mayor was from all sectors and not just from Facebook or online. Thus, the Duterte campaign did not have to purchase information,” Roque said in a statement.

“We should respect the President’s landslide victory, which was a result of the trust and confidence of the Filipino people, and not undermine it with unsubstantiated allegations,” the presidential spokesman added.

Cambridge Analytica, the controversial political consultancy firm, is currently embroiled in a controversy for purportedly siphoning around 50 million Facebook users’ date to aid Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential campaign.

An April 4 blog post by popular social media site Facebook ranked the Philippines as the second most affected country by Cambridge Analytica’s data breach, with at least 1.175 million accounts of Filipino users believed to have been stolen.

According to the South China Morning Post report, Cambridge Analytica’s parent firm, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), bragged on its website that it helped a Filipino client won in the national elections by rebranding him as a tough crime fighter.

The SCL, as claimed by the South China Morning Post, was allegedly referring to Duterte.

“In the run-up to the national elections, the incumbent client was widely perceived as both kind and honorable, qualities his campaign team thought were potentially election-winning,” the SCL said in website content, which was deleted but still visible in archived versions.

“But SCL’s research showed that many groups within the electorate were more likely to be swayed by qualities such as toughness and decisiveness. SCL used the cross-cutting issue of crime to rebrand the client as a strong, no-nonsense man of action, who would appeal to the true values of the voters,” it added.

Apart from the SCL’s post, the South China Morning Post released a photo, which showed that Cambridge Analytica chief executive officer Alexander Nix dined with cousins Jose Gabriel Laviña and Peter Tiu Laviña, then National Press Club president and now Communications Undersecretary Joel Sy Egco, and Duterte’s friend Taipan Millan.

The photo, according to the report, was taken at a National Press Club event in Manila in May 2015, or a year before Duterte was elected as President. (Ruth Abbey Gita/ SunStar Philippines)