The Facebook scandal over misuse of user information has reached a Canadian data analytics company. And a whistleblower says he believes the firm, which has ties to the Trump presidential campaign, may have swayed the U.K.'s 2016 Brexit vote.
Christopher Wylie, who worked at Cambridge Analytica and has brought forward accusations about how the company allegedly misused data from as many as 50 million Facebook users, told a committee in the U.K. Parliament that a Canadian firm allegedly linked to Cambridge Analytica developed the software that the Trump campaign used to target voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential race.
Wylie said he began to realize the impact of the company's work when Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and shortly after Trump's inauguration, he reached out to a reporter at The Guardian, initially as an anonymous source.
It was then that he "came to appreciate that the projects I was working on may have had a much wider impact than I initially anticipated it would," Wylie said, adding, "Donald Trump makes it click in your head that this has a much wider impact. I don't think that military-style information operations is conducive for any democratic process."
Wylie also alleges Aggregate IQ broke U.K. laws on spending limits to sway the country's 2016 referendum that set Brexit, the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, into motion.
"I think it is completely reasonable to say that there could have been a different outcome in the referendum had there not been, in my view, cheating," Wylie told lawmakers.
Wylie portrayed Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, as totally without qualms about breaking laws and undermining democracies around the world.
"They don't care whether or not what they do is legal as long as it gets the job done," he said. "Broadly, this is a company that goes around the world and undermines civil institutions of countries that are struggling to develop those institutions. ... They are an example of what modern-day colonialism looks like."
Wylie personally supported the "Leave" campaign, as he told the committee, but was troubled by what he viewed as threats to the democratic process. He pointed to the fact that a broad array of entities and parties supporting Leave selected Aggregate IQ, a company that he portrayed as having no public presence up to that point.
"When you look at the accumulation of evidence," he said, "I think it would be completely unreasonable to come to any other conclusion than this must be coordination, this must be a common purpose plan."
Wylie claimed that individuals from Aggregate IQ bragged to him about their "totally illegal" behavior.
He also told lawmakers that his predecessor at SCL, the parent company, died under mysterious circumstances in Kenya.
those are some scary claims. this company seems like a group straight out of a political thriller movie. ---
