The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) previously pursued a warrant to search the company’s servers
(Picture: Yui Mok / PA)Leaked communications by The Guardian reveal an unsuccessful attempt to smear Muhammadu Buhari and secure Goodluck Jonathan's presidency before a pivotal election in Nigeria in 2015.
In an undercover investigation, a group of Israeli contractors known as Team Jorge was exposed for allegedly influencing more than 30 international elections through the use of hacking, sabotage, and automated disinformation campaigns on social media.
Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces agent who now works privately under the alias “Jorge”, appears to have been behind the campaigns.
Leaked documents reveal that when Team Jorge worked covertly on the Nigerian presidential race in 2015, it did so alongside British consultancy company Cambridge Analytica.
But what is Cambridge Analytica and what was the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal about?
What is Cambridge Analytica?
Cambridge Analytica, previously known as SCL USA, was a British political consulting firm that came to prominence through the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
It was started in 2013 as a subsidiary of the private intelligence company and self-described “global election management agency” by long-time SCL executives Nigel Oakes, Alexander Nix, and Alexander Oakes, with Nix as CEO.
The well-connected founders had contact with, among others, the Conservative Party, the British Royal Family, and the British military.
The company closed operations in 2018 after the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal was exposed, although firms related to both Cambridge Analytica and its parent firm SCL still exist.
What scandal was the company involved in?
Cambridge Analytica is well-known for using data drawn from a number of sources as a means of potentially altering outcomes for its, sometimes military, clients.
In March 2018, multiple media outlets broke news of Cambridge Analytica’s business practices. Titles such as The New York Times and The Observer reported that the company had acquired and used personal data about Facebook users from an external researcher who had told Facebook he was collecting it for academic purposes.
Shortly afterwards, Channel 4 News aired undercover investigative videos showing Nix boasting about using prostitutes, bribery sting operations, and honey traps to discredit politicians on whom it had conducted opposition research, and saying that the company “ran all of (Donald Trump's) digital campaign”.
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) pursued a warrant to search the company’s servers.
As a result, Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from advertising on its platform, saying that it had been deceived. The British High Court then granted the ICO a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s London offices. Shortly after, Nix was suspended as CEO, and replaced by Julian Wheatland.
The 270,000 Facebook users who used Alexsandr Kogan’s “This Is Your Digital Life” Facebook app gave permission for this third-party app to access their data and their friend network information. As a result, about 87 million users’ data was acquired, the majority of whom had not explicitly given Cambridge Analytica permission to access their data.
This Is Your Digital Life was a personality-profiling app and asked simple personality questions similar to other Facebook quizzes.
According to Nix, they had about 5,000 data points for each participant. They acquired millions of data points from American citizens after gathering information through other data brokers.
The app developer breached Facebook’s terms of service by giving the data to Cambridge Analytica.
Who were the whistleblowers in the scandal?
Christopher Wylie, who resigned from the company in 2014, later became the whistleblower, revealing the company's involvement in Brexit and President Trump's campaign. He disclosed the company's connections to Russia as well.
Wylie’s book, Mindf*ck, released in 2019, describes how Cambridge Analytica used the information it collected from tens of millions of Facebook users to target those who were likely to be influenced by false information, racial stereotypes, and conspiracy theories.
Is Cambridge Analytica still a danger to democracy?
Wylie cautions that, despite Cambridge Analytica's demise, the firm's methods are still a danger to democracy. He points out that some of its former workers are presently engaged in work for Trump’s next presidential campaign.
