Cambridge Analytica: Difference between revisions

Cambridge Analytica

Company type	Data mining, data analysis
Founded	2014
Defunct	2 May 2018
Headquarters	London
Key people	Alexander Nix (CEO)[1] Robert Mercer (investor)[2] Rebekah Mercer (investor) Steve Bannon (vice president, former)[3]
Parent	SCL Group Limited[4]
Website	cambridgeanalytica.org

Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a British political consulting firm which combines data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process.^[5][6] It was started in 2013 as an offshoot of the SCL Group.^[7] The company is partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund manager who supports many politically conservative causes.^[7][8] The firm maintains offices in London, New York City, and Washington, D.C.^[9].

CEO Alexander Nix has said CA was involved in 44 US political races in 2014.^[10] In 2015, it performed data analysis services for Ted Cruz's presidential campaign.^[8] In 2016, CA worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign^[11] as well as the Leave.EU-campaign for the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union. CA's role in those campaigns has been controversial and is the subject of ongoing criminal investigations in both countries.^[12][13][14] Political scientists question CA's claims about the effectiveness of its methods of targeting voters.^[15][16]

In March 2018, multiple media outlets broke news of Cambridge Analytica's business practices. The New York Times and The Observer reported on the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data breach, in which the company used for political purposes personal information acquired from Facebook, without users' permission, by an external researcher who claimed to be 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 conducted opposition research, and saying that the company "ran all of (Donald Trump's) digital campaign". In response to the media reports, the Information Commissioner of the UK pursued a warrant to search the company's servers.^[17][18] Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from advertising on its platform, saying that it had been deceived.^[19][20] On March 23, 2018, the British High Court granted the Information Commissioner's Office a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's London offices.^[21]

Cambridge Analytica (SCL USA) was incorporated in January 2015 with its registered office in Westferry Circus, London and just one staff member, its director and CEO Alexander James Ashburner Nix (also appointed in January 2015).^[22] Nix is also the director of nine similar companies sharing the same registered offices in London, including Firecrest technologies, Emerdata and six SCL group companies including "SCL elections limited".^[23] In March 2018, Jennifer Mercer and Rebekah Anne Mercer became directors of Emerdata limited.^[24]

Nigel Oakes, the founder of SCL Group, acted as an image consultant for the former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid in 2000.^[25] SCL secretly campaigns in elections across the world. Techniques reportedly include using front companies and subcontractors to pay bribes and employ sex workers.^[26] Sex workers are reportedly used for honey trapping; targeted people are reportedly offered deals which are too good to be true, and the target's willingness to accept the deal is reportedly exposed. The company chief executive, Alexander Nix, was recorded saying, “It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed.”^[27]

Publicly, SCL Group calls itself a "global election management agency"^[28], while Politico reported it was known for involvement "in military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting".^[8] SCL's involvement in the political world has been primarily in the developing world where it has been used by the military and politicians to study and manipulate public opinion and political will. Slate writer Sharon Weinberger compared one of SCL's hypothetical test scenarios to fomenting a coup.^[8]

According to the Swiss Das Magazin, the methods of data analysis of CA are to a large degree based on the academic work of Michal Kosinski. In 2008, Kosinski had joined the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University where he then developed with his colleagues a profiling system using general online data, Facebook-likes, and smartphone data.^[29][30] He showed that with a limited number of "likes", people can be analysed better than friends or relatives can do and that individual psychological targeting is a powerful tool to influence people.^[29]

Cambridge Analytica was founded by conservatives Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer. A minimum of 15 million dollars has been invested into the company by Mercer, according to The New York Times.^[31] Bannon's stake in the company was estimated at 1 to 5 million dollars, but he divested his holdings in April 2017 as required by his role as White House Chief Strategist.^[32]

CA collects data on voters using sources such as demographics, consumer behaviour, internet activity, and other public and private sources. According to The Guardian, CA is using psychological data derived from millions of Facebook users, largely without users' permission or knowledge.^[33] Another source of information was the "Cruz Crew" mobile app that tracked physical movements and contacts and according to the Associates Press, invaded personal data more than any other app of presidential candidates.^[34]

"Today in the United States we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every individual ... So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people."

— Alexander Nix, chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, October 2016.^[1]

The company claims to use "data enhancement and audience segmentation techniques" providing "psychographic analysis" for a "deeper knowledge of the target audience". The company uses the OCEAN scale of personality traits.^[10][9] Using what it calls "behavioral microtargeting" the company indicates that it can predict "needs" of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then can be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments, and companies providing "a better and more actionable view of their key audiences." According to Sasha Issenberg, CA indicates that it can tell things about an individual he might not even know about himself.^[7][35]

CA derives much of its personality data on online surveys which it conducts on an ongoing basis. For each political client, the firm narrows voter segments from 32 different personality styles it attributes to every adult in the United States. The personality data informs the tone of the language used in ad messages or voter contact scripts, while additional data is used to determine voters' stances on particular issues.^[36]

The data gets updated with monthly surveys, asking about political preferences and how people get the information they use to make decisions. It also covers consumer topics about different brands and preferred products, building up an image of how someone shops as much as how they vote.^[37]

Channel 4 News, a news programme broadcast by the British public service Channel 4, conducted a four-month investigation into Cambridge Analytica starting in November 2017. An undercover reporter posed as a potential customer for Cambridge Analytica, hoping to help Sri Lankan candidates get elected. Video footage from this operation was published on 19 March 2018.^[38] From the footage, Cambridge Analytica executives say they worked on over 200 elections across the world.^[39] Alexander Nix was recorded in this investigation, talking "unguardedly about the company's practices".^[40] Nix said that his company uses honey traps, bribery stings, and prostitutes, for opposition research.^[41] For example, Nix offered to discredit political opponents in Sri Lanka with suggestive videos using "beautiful Ukrainian girls" and offers of bribes, even if the opponents did not accept the offers.^[42] Cambridge Analytica said that the video footage was "edited and scripted to grossly misrepresent" the recorded conversations and company's business practices. Nix said that he had "entertained a series of ludicrous hypothetical scenarios", but insisted his company does not engage in entrapment or bribery.^[43]

In the third part of the series, Nix also said that Cambridge Analytica "ran all the digital campaign" for Trump. Nix stated they used communications that would be self destructive, leaving no incriminating evidence. After the news segment was broadcast, the board of Cambridge Analytica suspended Nix as chief executive officer. The company also released a statement that the allegations did not represent the ethics of the company, and an independent entity would investigate Nix's statements.^[44]

The investigation also raised questions regarding campaign finance law. During the 2016 election, the company was employed both by Trump's campaign and Robert Mercer's Make America Number 1 Super PAC which supported Trump. While PACs are not limited in the amount of funds they can spend on behalf of a candidate, they are not allowed to coordinate strategy with the campaigns they are supporting. Nix's statements in the recorded video describe how the Trump campaign itself could "take the high road" and "stay clean", while the negative attacks were handled by the firm and the Super PAC, in a way which makes it "unattributable, untrackable". These statements potentially suggested unlawful coordination between Trump's campaign and the PAC, although Cambridge Analytica has denied this.^[45]

Political scientists have been highly skeptical of claims made by Cambridge Analytica about the effectiveness of its microtargeting of voters (microtargeting refers to the process of "analyzing data to predict the behavior, interests, and opinions held by specific groups of people and then serving them the messages they're most likely to respond to").^[46][15][16] Political scientists note that access to digital data is not going to provide significantly more information than from public voter databases, and the digital data has limited value over time as the preferences of voters change.^[15] Political scientists also note that it is hard to infer political values from personality traits, which means that it is easy to mistarget the messages that are sent to voters with specific personality traits.^[15] Research discussed by Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College showed that it is extremely hard to alter voters' preferences, because many likely voters are already committed partisans; as a result, it is easier to simply mobilize partisan voters.^[47][15] Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh, who has published on microtargeting in campaigns, has expressed strong skepticism about Cambridge Analytica's methods and their purported effectiveness, saying "Every claim about psychographics etc made by or about [Cambridge Analytica] is BS."^[48]

In 2017, CA claimed that it has psychological profiles of 220 million US citizens based on 5,000 separate data sets.^[49] In March 2017, The New York Times reported that CA had exaggerated its capabilities: "Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign."^[12] Trump aides have also disputed CA's role in the campaign, describing it as "modest" and noting that none of the company's efforts involved psychographics.^[12]

According to an aide and consultant for Ted Cruz's presidential campaign, their campaign stopped using CA after its psychographic models failed to identify likely Cruz supporters. The Cruz campaign ceased access to all of Cambridge's data after the South Carolina Republican primary on 20 February 2016 when Cruz came in third after Trump and Rubio.^[12][50]

The extent to which the American presidential and Brexit elections were decided by the data company's psy-ops was debatable. What was beyond doubt was the potential impact of the technology in the two elections which were determined by wafer-thin swing votes. The presidential campaign won the electoral college by 80,000 votes in three states and the EU referendum was decided by two per cent of UK voters.^[49]

The use of personal data collected without knowledge or permission to establish sophisticated models of user's personalities raises ethical and privacy issues.^[33] CA operates out of the United States; its operations would be illegal in Europe with its stricter privacy laws.^[34] While Cruz is outspoken about protecting personal information from the government, his database of CA has been described as "political-voter surveillance".^[34]

Regarding CA's use of Facebook users, a speaker for CA indicated that these users gave permission when signing up with the provider, while Facebook declared that "misleading people or misusing information" is in violation of Facebook's policies.^[33] In 2015, Facebook indicated that it was investigating the matter.^[33] In March 2018, Facebook announced that it had suspended the accounts of Strategic Communication Laboratories for failing to delete data on Facebook users that had been improperly collected.^[51]

While Alexander Nix suggests that data collection and microtargeting benefits the voters – because they receive messages about issues they care about – digital rights protection groups are concerned that private information is collected, stored, and shared while individuals are "left in the dark about [it]" and have no control.^[52]

Significant backlash against Facebook came to light in March 2018, resulting in controversy as well as a $37 billion drop in the market capitalization of Facebook, as of March 20.^[53] Due to the scandal of enabling monetization of Facebook personal data, one assessment was that only 41% of Facebook users trust the company.^[54] On March 26, the US Federal Trade Commission announced it is "conducting an open investigation of Facebook Inc's privacy practices following the disclosure that 50 million users' data got into the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica."^[55]

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (March 2018)

Cambridge Analytica's executives said in 2018 that the company had worked in more than 200 elections around the world, including in Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India, and Argentina.^[39]

CA ran campaigns in secret during Kenya's 2013 and 2017 elections.^[56] In 2018, a CA employee said that his predecessor at the company had been found dead in his hotel room in Kenya while working on Uhuru Kenyatta's 2013 campaign.^[57] The company claimed on its website to have conducted a survey of 47,000 Kenyans during the 2013 elections in order to understand "key national and local political issues, levels of trust in key politicians, voting behaviours/intentions, and preferred information channels". After the revelations in March 2018, where CA staff boasted of their power in Kenya, opposition figures called for an investigation. Norman Magaya, an official of the National Super Alliance, accused CA and the ruling Jubilee Party party": "This was a criminal enterprise which clearly wanted to subvert the will of the people - through manipulation, through propaganda," he told the BBC, as he called on both the US and UK to act to assist the investigation. "There must be criminal culpability."^[58] The ruling Jubilee Party downplayed CA's role, saying it had hired the firm's parent company, to assist with branding.^[59]

In India, Cambridge Analytica performed an "in-depth electorate analysis" during the 2010 elections to the Bihar Legislative Assembly.^[60]

Laurence Levy, a lawyer with the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, advises Rebekah Mercer, Steve Bannon, and Alexander Nix on the legality of their company, Cambridge Analytica, being involved in U.S. elections. He advises that Nix and any foreign nationals without a green card working for the company must not be involved in any decision making regarding any work the company performs for any clients related to U.S. elections. He further advises Nix to recuse himself from any involvement with the company's U.S. election work because he is not a U.S. citizen.^[61][62]

CA had entered the US market in 2012^[63] (or 2013),^[7] and was involved in 44 US congressional, US Senate and state-level elections in the 2014 midterm elections.^[63]

The company worked with the John Bolton Super PAC on a major digital and TV campaign focused on senate races in Arkansas, North Carolina and New Hampshire and helped turn out voters for the Republican candidates in those states. Two of the Republican candidates backed by the Bolton Super PAC, Thom Tillis in North Carolina and Tom Cotton in Arkansas, won their Senate bids, while Scott Brown lost in New Hampshire. The PAC ran 15 different spots each in North Carolina and Arkansas and 17 in New Hampshire, mostly online with some targeted directly to households using Dish and DirecTV. All were intended to push Bolton's national security agenda.^[64]

CA also supported Thom Tillis's successful campaign to oust Kay Hagan as a senator for North Carolina. The firm was credited for its role in identifying a sizeable cluster of North Carolinians who prioritised foreign affairs, which encouraged Tillis to shift the conversation from state-level debates over education policy to charges that incumbent Kay Hagan had failed to take ISIS's rise seriously.^[65] Tillis's campaign and the North Carolina Republican Party paid Cambridge Analytica $345,000 for these services.^[66]

CA sent dozens of non-U.S. citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to Republican candidates in 2014, opening the firm and individuals to prosecution under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, for being foreign agents having not registered through the United States Department of Justice as such.^[67]

CA's involvement in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries became known in July 2015.^[8] As of December 2015, CA claimed to have collected up to 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans.^[9] At that time Robert Mercer was a major supporter of Ted Cruz.^[7][68] The Mercer family funded CA directly and indirectly through several super-PACs as well as through payments via Cruz's campaign.^[33]

Ted Cruz became an early major client of CA in the 2016 presidential campaign. Just prior to the Iowa caucuses, the Cruz campaign had spent $3 million for CA's services,^[69] with additional money coming from allied Super-PACs.^[69] After Cruz's win at the Iowa caucus CA was credited with having been able to identify and motivate potential voters.^[70][71] Ultimately the Cruz campaign spent $5.8 million on work by CA.^[72]

Ben Carson was a second client of CA; his campaign had paid $220,000 for "data management" and "web service" as reported in October 2015.^[10] Marco Rubio's campaign was supported by Optimus Consulting.^[73] Meanwhile, the third competitor, Governor John Kasich, was supported by rivalling firm Applecart.^[74]

After Cruz dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2016, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer started to support Trump.^[75] In August, it became known that CA followed their allegiance and worked for Trump's presidential campaign.^[72][75] Trump's campaign also worked with digital firm Giles Parscale.^[72] In September, the Trump campaign spent $5 million to purchase television advertising.^[76] The Trump campaign spent less than $1 million in data work.^{[77][failed verification]}

In 2016, the company said that it had not used psychographics in the Trump presidential campaign.^[78] Cambridge Analytica targetted potential voters with bespoke messages. Cambridge Analytica’s data head, Alexander Tayler said, “When you think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 3m votes but won the electoral college vote, [t]hat’s down to the data and the research.”^[79]

The head of Cambridge Analytica said he asked WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, for help finding Hillary Clinton's 33,000 deleted emails.^[80][81][82]

On 18 May 2017, Time reported that the US Congress was investigating CA in connection with Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The report alleges that CA may have coordinated the spread of Russian propaganda using its microtargetting capabilities.^[83] According to the Trump campaign's digital operations chief, CA worked "side-by-side" with representatives from Facebook, Alphabet Inc. and Twitter on Trump's digital campaign activities.^[84]

On 4 August 2017, Michael Flynn, who is under investigation by US counterintelligence for his contacts with Russian officials, amended a public financial filing to reflect that he had served in an advisory role in an agreement with CA during the 2016 Trump campaign.^[85]

On 25 October 2017, Julian Assange said that on Twitter that he had been approached by Cambridge Analytica, but said he had rejected its proposal.^[86] Assange's tweet followed a story in The Daily Beast^[87] alleging that Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix had proposed a collaboration with Wikileaks to find the 33,000 emails that had been deleted from Clinton's private server. CNN said it had been told by several unnamed sources^[88] that Nix intended to turn the Clinton email archive released to the public by the State Department into a searchable database for the campaign or a pro-Trump political action committee.

On 14 December 2017, it was revealed that Robert Mueller had requested during the fall of 2017 that Cambridge Analytica turn over the emails of any of its employees who worked on the Trump campaign, as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.^[89]

In 2018, following disclosures that the company had inappropriately acquired the personal information of over 50 million Facebook users while working on Trump's presidential campaign, the Times of Israel reported that the company had used Israeli "intelligence gathering" as part of their efforts to influence the election results in Trump's favor.^[90]

Many donors to the UK Conservative Party reportedly have connections to the parent company of Cambridge Analytica.^[91]

CA became involved in the 2016 Brexit referendum supporting "persuadable" voters to vote for leaving the European Union.^[92] Articles by Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer and Guardian newspapers, respectively published in February and May 2017, speculated in detail that CA had influenced both the Brexit/Vote Leave option in the UK's 2016 EU membership referendum and Trump's 2016 US presidential campaign with Robert Mercer's backing of Donald Trump being key. They also discuss the legality of using the social data farmed.^[93][94][95] CA is pursuing legal action over the claims made in Cadwalladr's articles.^[93]

No campaign contributions, in cash or in kind, by Cambridge Analytica were reported to the UK electoral authorities. Both CA and Leave.eu refused to comment on any donation of services.^[96] On 23 March 2018, it was reported that a former employee, Brittany Kaiser, who was the company's former director of business development, has revealed that the company misled the public and MPs over its links with Leave.EU and the analysis of data which had been provided by UKIP. She said she felt she had lied by supporting Cambridge Analytica’s company line that it had done "no paid or unpaid work" for Leave.EU. "In my opinion, I was lying. In my opinion I felt like we should say, 'this is exactly what we did'".^[97] The following day, it was reported that the company claimed that it would be able to affect the outcome of the Referendum, and that it had produced a 10-page document headed “Big Data Solutions for the EU Referendum”, claiming it could single out 'Brexiteers' among voters, donors, politicians and journalists.^[98]

• Official website
• The Cambridge Analytica Files, ongoing investigative reporting from The Observer/The Guardian, beginning 17 March 2018, part of News: Cambridge Analytica beginning a year earlier
• What was the role of Cambridge Analytica in the EU referendum? – BBC Newsnight, YouTube.