– How do you feel about your own involvement in this now?
– I mean do you feel responsible for what happened?
Uhm … Yeah, I do. I do feel responsible for it.
And it's something that I regret
and that's partly why I’m here talking to you.
So that I can talk to ... So that people can know about
what this company does,
what this company is.
Throughout history you have examples
of grossly unethical experiments ...
– And is that what this was?
I think that, you know, yes.
It was a grossly unethical experiment
because you are playing with an entire country,
the psychology of an entire country
without their consent or awareness.
And not only are you like playing
with the psychology of an entire nation,
you're playing with the psychology of an entire nation
in the context of the democratic process.
My name is Christopher Wylie,
I’m a data scientist and I help set up Cambridge Analytica.
It's incorrect to call Cambridge Analytica
a purely sort of data science company
or an algorithm company.
It is a full service propaganda machine.
If you can control all the streams of information
around your opponents, you can influence
how they perceive that battle space
and you can then influence how they're going
to behave and react.
Alexander Nix, where do I begin?
He is not the easiest person to work for, he's ambitious.
He cares more, I think, about winning
than what we actually did at the company.
He's an upper-class Etonian who expects people
to follow him wherever he goes.
When I first met him I knew he was Steve, from America.
And then later I got told
that he was the editor of Brietbart.
I’d heard of Brietbart, you know
it's the blog for angry white men to rant about whatever.
Steve Bannon saw himself as an intellectual.
We would need to sort of present ourselves
in a way that was more academic, more academic,
more sort of ideas focused and all that.
Alexander realised that we needed a Cambridge site.
And so we set up a fake office in Cambridge.
And whenever Steve would come
we would bring a bunch of people from the London office,
plop them into the Cambridge office,
and give Steve the impression
that we had a lot of our operations based out of the University.
We changed how he perceived who we are
and what we were doing
and it was his idea, Steve's idea,
to give the company the name Cambridge Analytica.
This sort of warped perception is infused
into the name Cambridge Analytica itself.
– So you psyops'd Steve Bannon basically?
In a way. He was a target audience of one.
– And you changed his perception of reality?
And we changed his perception of who we were
and what we were doing
and what the situation he was in, yeah.
– And then from there, it was like, you took that,
to then America to change the perception
of reality for America?
Yes.
The reason why he was interested in this is
because he follows this idea of the Brietbart doctrine,
which is that, if you want to change politics
you first have to change culture
because politics flows from culture
and so what I said is that if you want to change culture,
you have to first understand what the units of culture are.
People are the units of culture.
So if you want to change politics,
you first have to change people to change the culture.
– Did that fit in with you know his …
he had quite a famous expression about politics being war?
If you want to fight a battle or you want to fight a war,
you want to win a war, you need weapons for that.
He wanted cultural weapons. We could build them for him.
But obviously he needed the money to do it,
so he took it to Robert Mercer.
– Who’s Robert Mercer?
He is an American billionaire in New York
and before he was … he got rich through algorithms.
Alexander Nix is with he and me starts
with his sort of like razzle-dazzle …
‘oh we work for the Pentagon, we work for MoD, Mi6 …
da da da da da … we are brilliant and Eton
and what not and I’m a posh British man
and you should trust me with all your money.’
Essentially the pitch was that we were going
to combine micro-targeting which had existed
in politics, which was you know, in part, my background
but bring on board a new construct, new constructs
from psychology so that we wouldn’t
just be targeting you as a voter
we would be targeting you as personality.
And in order to scale then we will then be collecting
a lot of data on people …
so that we could build a psychological profile of each voter
in a particular region or in this case all of the United States.
Alexander was quite excited, he got a bottle of champagne.
We had a sabre in the office, he sabered the champagne.
And but then the next day,
it was sort of like, "Ok now what?"
You get all this money
and you’ve got a billionaire breathing down your neck,
going: "Why don’t I have it yet?
"I’ve just given you tens of millions of dollars
"and like where’s my psychological warfare weapon."
I needed to figure out a way of getting data
and so I went to these Profs and asked,
"What do you think?" Right?
So, we’ve done all these cool pilots
but how would you do this for like an entire country?
What Kogan offered us was something that was way cheaper,
way faster and of a quality that nothing matched.
They had apps on Facebook that were given special permission
to harvest data not from just the person who used the app
or joined the app but also
it would then go into their entire friend network
and pull out all of the friends' data as well.
So if one person, if you joined the app,
I would not just see your Facebook profile,
I would see all of the Facebook profiles
of everybody that you’re friends with.
We would only need to
touch a couple of hundred thousand people
to expand in their entire social network,
which would then scale us to most of America.
– And people had no idea that their data
was being taken in this way?
No. No.
If you were a friend of somebody who used the app,
you would have no idea that I’ve just pulled all of your data.
It was almost everything that would be on a Facebook profile.
So that was things like status updates,
likes, in some cases private messages …
– So Cambridge Analytica has people’s
private messages they sent on Facebook?
I can’t say whether they did or not.
What I’m saying, what I’m saying is what the app can do.
– So, you didn’t ever stop to and think
actually this is people’s personal information
and we’re taking it and we’re using it in ways
that they don’t understand?
You didn’t think, "actually, I’m not sure about this"?
Uhm … You know … The company …
We didn’t do a good job at due diligence. So, no.
We didn’t … uhm … you know …
– But what about you? Not just the company,
your involvement in that.
Uhm ... No. I mean, I, we, we were solely focused
on getting us data and doing this experiment.
– How many profiles were you pulling?
Tens of millions. Upwards of 50, 60 million files
were collected in a two or three month period.
When Alexander Nix told the parliamentary inquiry
on fake news that Cambridge Analytica
has never used Facebook data,
at least from when I was there
that’s just fundamentally not true,
because we spent $1 million dollars
harvesting tens of millions of Facebook profiles
and those profiles were used as the basis of the algorithms
that became the foundation of Cambridge Analytica itself.
The company itself was founded on using Facebook data.
– So, you’ve harvested my data
and then you’ve used that to target me
in ways that I can’t see and that I don’t understand?
Yeah. So, we would know what kinds of messaging
you’d be susceptible to, including the framing of it,
the topics, the content, the tone,
whether it’s scary or not, that kind of thing.
So what you would be susceptible to
and where you’re going to consume that
and then how many times did we need to touch you
with that in order to change how you think about something.
In addition to having data scientists
and psychologists and strategists,
they also have and entire team of creatives,
designers, videographers, photographers.
They then create that content, that gets sent
to a targeting team, which then injects it into the internet.
Websites will be created. Blogs will be created.
Whatever it is that we think this target profile
will be receptive to, we will create content
on the Internet for them to find.
And then they see that and they click it
and then they go down the rabbit hole
until they start to think that, you know, something …
Until they start to think something differently, yeah.
Instead of standing in the public square
and saying what you think and then letting people
come and listen to you and have that shared experience
as to what your, what your narrative is,
you are whispering into the ear of each and every voter
and you may be whispering one thing to this voter
and another thing to another voter.
We risk fragmenting society
in a way where we don’t have anymore shared experiences
and we don’t have anymore shared understanding.
If we don’t have anymore shared understanding
how can we be a functioning society?
– Thinking about that now,
do you think that did change America or played a part in it?
I think it probably played a part.
I can’t say for sure whether, you know, what was the defining …
What was the defining factor in,
you know, getting Trump elected or growing the alt-right.
If you want to fundamentally change society
you first have to break it.
And it’s only when you break it is when you can re-mould
the pieces into your vision of a new, of a new society.
This was the weapon that Steve Bannon wanted
to build to fight his culture war.
– So, who do you trust?
I … I … I ... This is such a hard question to answer.
Who do I trust? Uhm …
I don’t want to say I don’t trust anyone but …
Do you know what I would say? I would say
I go through life with a healthy dose of skepticism
and I think that healthy dose of skepticism
as to what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing
and who you’re talking to
is the best way to go through life.