What is Cambridge analytica?
Cambridge Analytica LLC (CA) is a limited liability corporation incorporated in New York, but largely run as a British political consulting firm which combines data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process. It was started in 2013 as an offshoot of the SCL Group.
The company is partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund manager who supports many politically conservative causes. Alexander Nix is CEO of this corporation. The firm maintains offices in London, New York City, and Washington, D.C.
Involvement
Alexander Nix has said CA was involved in 44 US political races in 2014. In 2015, it performed data analysis services for Ted Cruz's presidential campaign. In 2016, CA worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign 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 Political scientists question CA's claims about the effectiveness of its methods of targeting voters.
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 about Facebook users, 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. Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from advertising on its platform, saying that it had been deceived. On March 23, 2018, the British High Court granted the Information Commissioner's Office a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's London offices.
The data about the 50 million Facebook users were acquired from 270,000 Facebook users who shared the data with the app "thisisyourdigitallife". By giving this third-party app permission to acquire their data, back in 2015, this also gave the app information about the friend network of those people, which resulted in information about 50 million users. The app developer breached Facebook's terms of service by giving the data to Cambridge Analytica.
Methodologies
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. Using what it calls "behavioral micro targeting" 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.
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.
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.
Others
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. 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 The ruling Jubilee Party downplayed CA's role, saying it had hired the firm's parent company, to assist with branding.
In India, Cambridge Analytica performed an "in-depth electorate analysis" during the 2010 elections to the Bihar Legislative Assembly.
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.
CA had entered the US market in 2012 (or 2013), and was involved in 44 US congressional, US Senate and state-level elections in the 2014 midterm elections.
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.
CA's involvement in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries became known in July 2015. As of December 2015, CA claimed to have collected up to 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans. At that time Robert Mercer was a major supporter of Ted Cruz. The Mercer family funded CA directly and indirectly through several super-PACs as well as through payments via Cruz's campaign.
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. 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.
CA became involved in the 2016 Brexit referendum supporting "persuadable" voters to vote for leaving the European Union. 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. CA is pursuing legal action over the claims made in Cadwalladr's articles.
