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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2018/may/16/christopher-wylie-cambridge-analytica-testifies-us-senate-live
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| Bannon wanted 'weapons for a culture war', says Cambridge Analytica whistleblower – live | Bannon wanted 'weapons for a culture war', says Cambridge Analytica whistleblower – live |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Here’s Kamala Harris, Democrat from California. | |
| Harris starts by discussing the Facebook business model: This arrangement is not always working in the best interest of the American people. Users have little to no idea of just how Facebook tracks their information ... In the real world, this would be like someone following you as you walk down the street, watching who you are, where you’re going, and who you’re with. For most people, this would be an invasion of privacy and most people would call the cops. | |
| Blumenthal: Mentions that Jamison worked on the Trump transition. He asks whether Jamison had any contact with Michael Cohen. | |
| Jamison says no. | |
| Next up is Richard Blumental, Democrat from Connecticut: Are you aware of discussions between CA and representatives of the Russian government? | |
| Wylie: I’m aware of conversations with Lukoil, which has ties to the Russian government. | |
| Blumenthal: Asks about campaign donations? | |
| Wylie: After I inquired about the relatively convoluted set up of CA, what was explained to me was that when you invest money as an investor into a company that you own, it doesn’t necessarily constitute an election donation which is declarable. | |
| Blumenthal: Were you told that the purpose of the set up was to exploit this distinction? | |
| Wylie: It was explained to me as a benefit of the setup. | |
| Blumenthal: Were there firewalls set up to separate campaigns? | |
| Wylie: Not that I saw. I did see memos about separating contact between campaigns and PACs. But when I was there I did not see those instructions followed. | |
| Blumenthal: Can you provide examples of focus groups or other efforts to suppress voting? | |
| Wylie: I can work with the committee to give a fuller explanation. I am aware of research that was looked at about what motivates and demotivates people. | |
| Cruz is arguing that Facebook gives preferential treatment to Democratic campaigns. | |
| Cruz: Does anyone on the panel know what the Hillary Clinton campaign did on the data side? | |
| [crickets] | |
| This is not really surprising since none of the witnesses have any connection to her campaign. | |
| Next up is Senator Ted Cruz, another client of Cambridge Analytica. The Guardian first reported on the misappropriation of the Facebook dataset when CA was working for Cruz’s presidential campaign in December 2015. | |
| Unsurprisingly, Cruz begins his questioning by turning to Obama’s use of Facebook data in 2015. | |
| Coons: Was one of Steve Bannon’s goals to supress voting? | |
| Wylie: That was my understanding? | |
| Coons: Was voter suppression a service that clients could request? | |
| Wylie: Yes. | |
| Coons: Why was CA testing Putin’s aggressive actions? And what would it mean if Russian intelligence got this dataset? | |
| Wylie: I don’t have a clear answer for why the company was testing Russian expansionism. In terms of the dangers, data is powerful and if it’s put into the wrong hands it becomes a weapon. Companies like Facebook are not just social networking sites; they’re opportunities for information warfares, not just for state actors but also non-state actors. We have to look at protecting cyberspace just as we have agencies to protect the borders, land, space and air. | |
| Wylie: I don’t contest what Professor Hersh was saying in that it is true that persuading someone compared to motivating someone is very hard. But CA found that in comparison to traditional marketing sites, the data you can get from social media is much more dense and more valuable. | |
| Christopher Coons, Democrat from Delaware, starts by bringing up the research of Michal Kosinski on how Facebook likes can be used to predict personal traits about individuals. | |
| Wylie: The basis of what we were doing at CA was the papers by Dr Kosinski. The firm replicated his approach and sought to use it. You can get to the same level of predicting personality traits as your spouse. | |
| Hersh: I encourage my students to never share political ideas on social media. I don’t agree that you don’t have a choice not to use it. Facebook has a lot of data. I think it has acted really inappropriately, notes that they take no responsibility for how they’re used. | |
| Tillis is again discussing the use of Facebook data by the Obama campaign. This is a common talking point for Republicans who want to make the point that data use by political campaigns is bipartisan, which is true enough. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that people who downloaded the Obama campaign app were clearly aware that they were using a political app. By contrast, the Facebook data set in question here was obtained via a personality quiz application whose users would have had no idea that their data would eventually be used by a political campaign. | |
| Thom Tillis, Republican senator from North Carolina: “I hope that the result of this hearing is figuring out what if anything Congress should do with respect to a regulatory framework.” | |
| Tillis was actually a client of Cambridge Analytica in 2014. He brings this up during his questioning of Wylie. | |
| Klobuchar: What do you know about voter suppression? | |
| Wylie: One of the things that provoked me to leave was discussions about “voter disengagement” and the idea of targeting African Americans. Mentions that he has seen documents about this. | |
| Klobuchar: What states were focused on? | |
| Wylie: States that were winnable by Republicans. | |
| Klobuchar: What’s the potential overlap for users who were shown IRA ads and the users’ whose data was used by CA? | |
| Wylie: My concern is that information may have been shared or misappropriated by a Russian entity from Cambridge Analytica. It’s not just whether or not these individual records were targeted, but if it was used to build an algorithm, other uses could also have been exposed. | |
| Wylie: We should be requiring safety standards for online platforms and software. | |
| Amy Klobuchar, Democratic senator from Minnesota, raises her legislation to allow opting out of data collection. | |
| Would this legislation have prevented the Facebook data harvest? | |
| Wylie: Not really because of the API that was allowing people to pull data. | |
| Wylie: You have to imagine what the developments we’ll see moving forward. Notes that when he signed up for Facebook, it didn’t have facial recognition so he uploaded photos. Then it started scanning faces. We have to think about how data will be used in the future. | |
| Wylie: Social media is not really a choice for most people. The internet is not really a choice for most people. I don’t know a job that would let you go in and not use Google. Although we use this narrative of choice, they substantially don’t have a choice. I don’t know a job that would hire someone who refuses to use the internet. | |
| Cornyn: There’s this idea in the law that your consent must be informed. Is that too much to ask for? | |
| Wylie: People absolutely should have informed consent. But when you go and see a doctor, you consenting to surgery is proportionate to the benefit you are getting. When someone “consents” to something online, if that’s the only way you can get a job it’s not really a fair situation. We should take a step back from this narrative of consent and look at the fact that you don’t have a lot of choice. | |
| Cornyn: But I can use Twitter instead of Facebook. | |
| Wylie: Yeah, but they all do the same thing and conduct a huge amount of data comparative to the benefit they give you. | |
| Cornyn: Mark Zuckerberg kept saying that they don’t sell data, and I said they clearly rent it. How would you characterize it? | Cornyn: Mark Zuckerberg kept saying that they don’t sell data, and I said they clearly rent it. How would you characterize it? |
| Wylie: They’ve created a platform that encourages the use of data. It’s true that you can’t go to Facebook and simply buy it, but they make it readily available through network of applications, or the fact that the layout of the profiles make it very conducive to scraping data. They have a setup that catalyzes misuse in my view. | Wylie: They’ve created a platform that encourages the use of data. It’s true that you can’t go to Facebook and simply buy it, but they make it readily available through network of applications, or the fact that the layout of the profiles make it very conducive to scraping data. They have a setup that catalyzes misuse in my view. |