Cambridge Analytica

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Cambridge Analytica (CA)
legal form subsidiary
founding 2014
resolution 2018
Seat New York City , New York , United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
management Alexander Nix (suspended on March 20, 2018)
Number of employees approx. 200
Branch Data analysis , microtargeting
Website cambridgeanalytica.org

Cambridge Analytica (CA) was a data analytics company founded in 2014 by the UK's SCL Group , which filed for bankruptcy in May 2018. It was headquartered in New York City and collected and analyzed data on potential voters on a large scale with the aim of influencing voter behavior through individually tailored messages ( microtargeting ).

Initially, the company was mainly active in the USA because data protection regulations are less strict there than in Europe. It was closely networked with the parent company; many of the approximately 200 employees worked for both companies at the same time, and shared offices were used in different locations. Until his suspension on March 20, 2018, Alexander Nix , one of the former directors of SCL, held the position.

Foundation, financing

Alexander Nix, the director of the election department of the British SCL Group ( SCL Elections ), won the American computer scientist and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer as the main investor for a subsidiary in the USA. Mercer had made his fortune from software that used probabilistic algorithms in high frequency trading . Stephen Bannon , at the time editor of Breitbart News, which was also funded by Mercer and classified as right-wing populist to right-wing radical , was also involved in founding Cambridge Analytica . Bannon was friends with the Mercers; together they pursued the goal of disempowering the political establishment in the US capital Washington .

In 2013 they started a pilot project to support Republican Ken Cuccinelli by means of surveys and targeted messages ("psychographic messaging") to potential voters in the fight for governor in Virginia , for which Mercer made $ 1.5 million available. Although Cuccinelli lost the election, Mercer was then willing to invest $ 15 million in a joint venture with the SCL Group. Bannon proposed the name "Cambridge Analytica" and became Vice President. Rebekah Mercer, a daughter of Robert Mercer, became president.

Influence on US election campaigns

Data acquisition

In March 2018, it was announced through whistleblower Christopher Wylie that Cambridge Analytica was basing its activities on data sets acquired by parent company SCL in 2014 from a company called Global Science Research (GSR). GSR was run by Aleksandr Kogan, a psychologist at Cambridge University . Kogan had used an app - supposedly for scientific purposes - and with a small financial incentive to conduct personality tests with American Facebook users, whose participants at the end of each test agreed to access their profiles and those of their contacts. With 320,000 such tests, Kogan obtained an average of around 160 additional data sets from Facebook profiles, the owners of which were not aware of them. The total of more than 50 million data sets, for the creation of which SCL had made available around one million dollars, formed the basis for the work of Cambridge Analytica in US election campaigns.

As announced in April 2018, Kogan (GSR) also acquired user data from the short message service Twitter in 2015 . Public tweets were randomly read out by Kogan between December 2014 and April 2015.

Commissioned work in election campaigns

In 2014, Cambridge Analytica (CA) was involved in 44 US election campaigns, according to Nix. One of the early clients was the John Bolton Super PAC , whose aim was to promote militarist attitudes. The company gained notoriety in 2015 when it won Ted Cruz as its first major customer when he ran for the Republican Party presidential candidate . CA claims to have pushed Cruz from a "no-name" to a well-known candidate worth voting for. In fact, Cruz's campaign team ended their collaboration with CA when it turned out that the predictions they had made about voting behavior in the primaries did not apply. The fact that CA was even called in was at the urging of Rebekah Mercer, who, like her father, was involved in supporting the Cruz election campaign with millions and was very dissatisfied with how things had gone so far.

When Cruz was eliminated in the primary campaign, the Mercers relied on Donald Trump , who at the time dominated the Republican primary but was still considered an outsider in the presidential election, and geared the Super-PAC they created to support Cruz. Cambridge Analytica was switched on again and later claimed to have played a "decisive role" in bringing about the surprising election victory for Trump. Nix claimed that the company had a unique way to create personal profiles after the OCEAN model designed and created profiles of 220 million US citizens. Critics soon expressed doubts as to whether this “our secret sauce” even existed. It is also questionable whether the application of the model for predicting voter behavior could work. According to various statements by those involved at the time, CA was only entrusted with relatively insignificant tasks; in particular, no personality profiles were created. In March 2018, however, it became known that CA already had the Facebook profiles of around 50 million US citizens in 2014 (see above). The Trump team transferred a total of $ 5.9 million to CA from July through December 2016, according to official reports.

Cambridge Analytica CEO, Alexander Nix (2017)

In September 2017 Nix spoke on a Innovation of the Service Plan Group in Munich about the work of CA for Trump, including categorizing personalities and response with individually tailored messages on the Internet: you have deliberately identified states that as strongholds of the Democratic Party were , but were potential swing states from CA's perspective . As an example, he cited Wisconsin , where Hillary Clinton did not appear in the election campaign, but Trump did, based on the CA analysis, and Trump surprisingly won the state (by a narrow margin). Trump's unexpected victories in some “swing states” were decisive for the overall result of the US presidential election in 2016 after Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2015/16 and triggered a worldwide discussion about the influence of “ fake news ” on elections.

In October 2017, it was announced that during the US election campaign in the summer of 2016, Nix had contacted WikiLeaks to provide him with emails from Hillary Clinton from her time as Secretary of State for use in Trump's election campaign . This came at a time when Trump was increasing allegations that Clinton deleted thousands of emails from her server. Julian Assange , the head of WikiLeaks, confirmed the request, stating that it had been rejected.

See also: Explanations for Donald Trump's unexpected election victory in 2016

other activities

Supporters of the Brexit campaign in Great Britain (Leave.eu) also allegedly used the services of Cambridge Analytica, which the company denied after the British data protection officer had initiated an investigation into the proceedings. In October 2017, it became known that the US House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence was investigating CA's role in the election campaign. With regard to current activities, Nix stated in March 2017 that the company had been active in four campaigns in Asia, Africa and South America at that time.

2018: bankruptcy

On May 2, 2018, the company announced that it had filed for bankruptcy like the US parent company SCL Group and would immediately terminate all activities.

Emerdata

Some time ago, the former CA owners founded a new company called Emerdata , the existence of which was first announced in March 2018; there are numerous personal overlaps with CA. The Emerdata business address is the same as CA's London address, but does not have its own office. Staff include sisters Rebekah Mercer , President of Cambridge Analytica, and Jennifer Mercer, whose father Robert Mercer was the main investor in Cambridge Analytica.

literature

  • Brittany Kaiser : The Data Dictatorship. How elections are rigged. HarperCollins, Hamburg 2020, ISBN 978-3-95967-390-7 (with photos, infographics and notes).
    • American original edition: Targeted. The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again. HarperCollins, New York 2019, ISBN 9780062965790 .

Web links

Commons : Cambridge Analytica  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Data abuse scandal - Cambridge Analytica suspends CEO Alexander Nix. In: sueddeutsche.de. March 20, 2018, accessed December 12, 2019 .
  2. ^ A b Matthew Rosenberg: Bolton Was Early Beneficiary of Cambridge Analytica's Facebook Data. In: nytimes.com . March 23, 2018, accessed April 29, 2018 .
  3. ^ A b c Nicolas Confessore, Danny Hakim : Data Firm Says "Secret Sauce" Aided Trump; Many scoff. In: nytimes.com. March 6, 2017, accessed April 26, 2018 .
  4. ^ A b c Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, Carole Cadwalladr: How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions. In: nytimes.com . March 17, 2018, accessed May 3, 2018 .
  5. ↑ a b c Jane Mayer: Trump's Money Man . In: The New Yorker . March 27, 2017 (English, newyorker.com: The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency [accessed March 27, 2017]).
  6. ↑ Michelle Goldberg: Trump's High-Tech Dirty Tricksters. In: nytimes.com . March 19, 2018, accessed May 4, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Craig Timberg, Tony Romm, Elizabeth Dwoskin: Facebook: 'Malicious actors' used its tools to discover identities and collect data on a massive global scale. In: washingtonpost.com. April 4, 2018, accessed May 5, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Hannes Grassegger, Mikael Krogerus: “I only showed that the bomb exists” . In: Tages-Anzeiger , March 20, 2018; accessed on April 5, 2018
  9. ^ Carole Cadwalladr: The Cambridge Analytica Files - 'I made Steve Bannon's psychological warfare tool': meet the data was whistleblower. In: theguardian.com . March 18, 2018, accessed November 12, 2019.
  10. ↑ See also Ingo Dachwitz, Tomas Rudl: Cambridge Analytica: What we know about "the biggest data leak in the history of Facebook" . Netzpolitik.org, March 21, 2018.
  11. ↑ Data scandal - Twitter sold data to Cambridge Analytica. In: faz.net. April 30, 2018, accessed February 22, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Frances Stead Sellers: Cruz campaign paid $ 750,000 to 'psychographic profiling' company . The Washington Post, October 19, 2015.
  13. ↑ Kenneth Vogel, Tarini Parti: Cruz partners with donor's 'psychographic' firm. In: politico.com . July 7, 2017, accessed October 27, 2019 .
  14. ^ A b Patrick Beuth: US election - The air pumps from Cambridge Analytica. In: zeit.de . March 7, 2017, accessed May 1, 2018 .
  15. ^ Trump campaign: Cambridge Analytica had contact with Wikileaks . derStandard.de , October 26, 2017.
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Borgfeld: The advertising world is turned upside down. In: horizont.net . September 28, 2017, accessed February 7, 2020.
  17. ↑ Major swing states go to Trump . Spiegel Online , November 9, 2016.
  18. ↑ Kara Scannell, Dana Bash and Marshall Cohen: Trump campaign analytics company contacted WikiLeaks about Clinton emails . CNN , October 26, 2017.
  19. ^ Rhys Blakely: Data scientists target 20 million new voters for Trump. In: thetimes.co.uk. September 22, 2016, accessed on December 16, 2019 (English, preview; for full text: registration required).
  20. ↑ Jannis Brühl: Propaganda allegation - US Congress examines psychological tricks in Trump's election campaign . In: sueddeutsche.de . October 12, 2017. Retrieved October 25, 2019.
  21. ^ Mathias Müller von Blumencron : Interview with Alexander Nix: "We want to decipher the personality". In: faz.net . March 13, 2017, accessed January 19, 2019 .
  22. ↑ Cambridge Analytica is discontinuing its services. In: faz.net. May 2, 2018, accessed May 2, 2018 .
  23. ↑ Ivo Mijnssen: Cambridge Analytica is dead - long live Emerdata. In: nzz.ch . May 3, 2018, accessed May 3, 2018 .
  24. ↑ Jason Murdock: What is Emerdata? As Cambridge Analytica shuts, directors surface new firm. In: newsweek.com. May 3, 2018, accessed May 4, 2018 .