QAA Podcast - Episode 214: Rewriting Cambridge Analytica (P2) feat Anthony Mansuy

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

This week we bring you part 2 of our exploration of the Cambridge Analytica Scandal — cast in a very different light. In part 1 we took a look at Christopher Wylie’s origin story and the sketchy science behind the supposed “psychological warfare mindfuck tool” Steve Bannon employed within Cambridge Analytica on behalf of Robert Mercer, which, the story goes, won the election for Donald Trump by manipulating the masses. In part 2, we’re gonna be taking a look at Wylie’s attempt to create his own Cambridge Analytica, how he turned into the supposed do-gooder whistleblower in the first place, and what it means for the accepted narrative about the scandal. We are joined again by guest writer Anthony Mansuy, a French reporter for Society Magazine. For this two-parter, Anthony conducted months of research and forty exclusive interviews. You’ll be hearing from Cambridge Analytica employees, data scientists, former Obama, Trump and Cruz campaign staffers, as well as friends and associates of Chris Wylie. The evidence lays out how Wylie spread numerous fabrications and exaggerations to minimize his contribution to the development of Cambridge Analytica's tools and conceal the true causes of his departure from the organization. More importantly, Wylie capitalized on the deepest fears held by the liberal media about the far-right, social media, and Russia; allowing him to craft the perfect narrative to fit the political moment — one that persists to this day. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Anthony Mansuy: https://twitter.com/AnthonyMansuy Les Dissidents (Anthony's book): https://bit.ly/3jgCFfK Merch: http://merch.qanonanonymous.com Music by Pontus Berghe, Nick Sena, DJ Death. Editing by Corey Klotz.

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome, listener to chapter 214 of the Q&ONANANANANANANAS podcast, the Cambridge Analytica Part 2 episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatanski, Anthony Monsuie, Julian Fields, and Travis Vio.

This week, we... We bring you part two of our exploration of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, cast in a very different light. In part one, we took a look at Christopher Wiley's origin story and the sketchy science behind the supposed psychological warfare mind fuck tool Steve Bannon employed on behalf of Robert Mercer, which, the story goes, won the election for Donald Trump by manipulating the masses. In part two, we're going to be taking a look at Wiley's attempt to create his own Cambridge Analytica, how he turned into the supposed do-gooder whistleblower in the first

place and what it means for the accepted narrative about the scandal. To dig into this, we're joined again by guest writer Anthony Monsui, a Paris-based reporter for French Outlet Society magazine. Anthony spent the better part of 2020 reinvestigating the claims of Christopher Wiley, the former contractor who blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica. For this two-parter, Antony conducted months of research and 40 exclusive interviews. You'll be hearing from Cambridge Analytica employees, data scientists, former Obama, Trump, and Cruz campaign staffers, as well as friends.

and associates of Chris Wiley. The evidence lays out how Wiley spread numerous fabrications and exaggerations to minimize his contribution to the development of Cambridge Analytica's tools and concealed the true causes of his departure from the organization. More importantly, Wiley capitalized on the deepest fears held by the liberal media about the far right, social media, and Russia, allowing him to craft the perfect narrative to fit the political moment, one that persists to this day. So let's get right into it.

Rewriting Cambridge Analytica, Part 2, Beautiful Thinking. Remember Chris Wiley's idea for a company that he was calling Argus and then Penocticon? Well, as it came to fruition, he chose a new name for it, an ancient Greek word that means beautiful thinking, Unoya. It appears that Wiley had been planning to use SCL elections, a subdivision of Cambridge Analytica's parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, as a way to fund the research and data mining for his own beloved project. This becomes apparent when you examine a series of moves he made indicating that he didn't

leave Cambridge Analytica for ethical reasons, but because he wanted to set Unoya up as a competitor. Let's take a look at the evidence. First, and most convincingly, he signed an agreement with Alexander Kogan's company Global Science Research, or GSR, to get the data that Cambridge Analytica's CEO, Alexander Nix, paid for. Here's an excerpt from Kogan's testimony to the UK Parliament. GSR entered into an agreement with UNOIA in the summer of 2014 to provide GSR app data to UNOIA in return for getting other commercial data sets from UNOIA.

Under this agreement, GSR provided UNOIA with a copy of all GSR app data for people who reported their location in the United States along with GSR personality analysis on some of the data. Then there are several trips to Silicon Valley. According to his friend Jeremy, not his real name, Wiley flew there at least twice in January 2014 and in the fall of 2014. He wanted his friend, a California entrepreneur, to help him find investors. Here's what he DMed to Jeremy in early 2014. We get zero equity, which is why we want to leave, because we're getting other people rich off of our work. In June of 2014, a couple of weeks before leaving Cambridge Analytica, while he incorporated UNOIA Technologies in Delaware. He also

met with Ken Strasma, the guy who had led the micro-targeting efforts of the first Obama presidential campaign. Here's what Strasma told us. They formed the company, Unoya. We did meet with them. They came to our New York offices, and we talked

with them for a while and gave what advice we could. So, yeah, we're definitely in touch you at that point. And do you remember who was present? Let's see. So Chris, of course, There was someone at Tadas, I don't recall this, surname.

I know there were two others. I believe it was either four or five people working with Chris at the time who met with us. Wiley never mentioned Eunoya in his book about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Here's what Wiley told us. It didn't do anything. Like, it was literally, you know, it sounds like something, it had no employees. like it was just, you know, out of, if you, I don't know if you've done contracting before, but you use a company, you know, you have certain, you can get insurance with it,

you can build through it, it makes it easier tax, you know, you can do VAT, registration, things like that. That's what it was. It was a contracting company, and the reason it received data is because when I was at Cambridge Analytica, we were working on data. but it got deleted and like sort of nothing really came from it like it's sort of I don't know what else to say other than I didn't talk about it because incorporated with Mark Giddelson that us you see us no not not taught us yeah but Mark because I used

as flat as the registration so yes here you can kind of see you know first there's like the dissonance with what Kens Trasmat told just before they fly to New York there's five of them to just get inside, I think, from Ken Strassma. And then, kind of, if you unpeel this thing, he's just, oh, yeah, I incorporated the company at my friend's flat because I was living here at that point. And then we are going to see what happens next, but we're kind of moving into the territory where Wiley is trying to muddy the waters. We also have another source corroborating that he was trying to set up Unoya as a competitor.

In September 2014, Wiley hired a guy he knew from his former high school back in Canada. His name was Alexander Neumann. Alexander moved to London, just like Wiley, and at the time he was launching his career as a graphic designer. They spoke for a few days on Facebook Messenger before Wiley started describing what he wanted to do with his new company. Wiley tasked Alexander with designing the graphic identity for Unoya. We obtained the company's brand identity brief, which explained that certain words ought to be excluded from Unoya's corporate lexicon. We absolutely do not want to be perceived as a data company, it reads. It went on to lay out a bullet point list of banned, quote-unquote, creepy terms,

like scraping, data mining, and psychometric, psychosocial, psycho-anything. The materials did not make clear where any of the data would be coming from. Up until August 2015, Alexander was in repeated communications with Unoya, mostly through Mark Gettelson and Chris Wiley, who were working with a guy called Tadas Yusikas to set up the company. One night in October, Alexander met Yusikas, the data scientist in the team, at a steakhouse in Vauxhall. Yusikas introduced himself as the chief technical officer of Unoya. After a preliminary chat, Tadas Yusikas started talking about keeping tabs on the entire American population. At this point, Alexander pulled out his phone and started recording the conversation.

Here's Yusikas from that conversation. Like, this is the type of thing that, like, like Egyptian pyramids, like you fucking have to plan to build this. Because if you don't, it's not going to happen. No. But if you do, it can. And it's going to be like the world one that. You know, on par with these fundamental products in the technology sector that exists at the moment. Like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and all that shit.

Because the thing that we're trying to build is just pretty crazy. Yusica spoke about Yunaia's conception. We planned to brand our products with different names. But for this round, we want to... We believe in this beautiful thinking, you know, believe in this word, we believe in this concept. It's a little bit too kind of like smarty pants. It's a bit esoteric. Yeah.

But like, fuck it, you know, it's just their work. Yeah. Yusikas then showed Alex Project Ripon on his laptop, explaining that they could analyze the entire population of North Carolina. Yusikas seemed to be saying that Unoya would be using Cambridge Analytica's software and data. So this is North Carolina, actually. Yeah. This is the project that Chris came up with and I built, and we're running now in America at the moment. So this is a lot of data. This is actually for their midterm elections, for senators.

Oh, huh? You know, so the Senate-Cell election. Yeah. You're looking at something that is being used currently to influence people, millions of people in America. Right, right. Crazy. For a few months after that meeting, Unoya continued to develop, but things were going slower than planned. And then, something strange happened. Here's Alexander speaking about what Unoya was up to in May of 2015. In about May or so, they were feverishly kind of getting prepared for a meeting to what the meeting was. I don't know, but then I got an email that was like subject line Trump, which was a bit auspicious.

So I got an email, which I still have in my inbox, which all it says is just like subject to line Trump is from Mark Gettelson. And it's like just a document that I was supposed to like, it was a word document that I was supposed to plug into their letter brief that I designed. And so for me, of course, I'm like, sure, whatever. What's Trump? I don't care. He's a reality TV man. Who cares about this man, right? All the versions of what happened next have one thing in common. People from UNOIA met with Corey Lewandowski,

Donald Trump's first campaign manager. In his book, Wiley wrote that Mark Block, the former campaign manager for Herman Kane, who introduced Nix to the Mercer's, called Wiley to get his help working for the Trump organization. He claimed that this was an entirely separate entity from the Trump campaign. In his version, Block wanted Unoya to do market research for The Apprentice and Trump's casinos.

Then, Mark Gettleson and Tadas Yusikas, Wiley's associates at Unoya, went to meet with Corey Lewandowski. Here's Alexander again. All I knew was it was just like urgently pressing that they get all this documents and materials out of the way and sent to them. So, business cards, like logo, everything had to be. So why was it called Trump? and send to you? Yes. So, but why?

I don't know. And it's a bit weird that, like, Mark was make a subject line that says Trump and then only, like, literally there's nothing else in it. There's just Trump and then attachment of, like, what we were, I was supposed to copy and paste, right? But this document, it was just kind of an outline of what Unoya was. So you kind of can infer that, obviously,

they, you know, there was some connection between subject line and what was, what was, what was, in the attachment. Alexander showed us these emails live on his phone, and they were all sent in the same thread by either Mark Gettleson's Gmail address or Chris at Unoya. Technology. In the attachments, they described a list of products

they were offering, including standard micro-targeting, psychographic micro-targeting, and donor micro-targeting. These contradicted what Wiley stated in his book and seemed to indicate that Unoya was pitching political services to Corey Lewandowski and the Trump campaign. Altoni also spoke with Peter Jukes, the co-founder of Byline Times, an online British outlet. He was pretty close to Chris Wiley, and they had spent days together in the lead-up to the publication of The Guardian Exposé. Jukes was a pretty key figure in helping Wiley set up his new life as a whistleblower.

He was even listed as one of the unsung heroes of the story in the final section of Wiley's book. And he confirmed to us that Wiley pitched Unoya's services to the Trump campaign. Did he mention this company, Yanoia, to you when you met him? He was a bit shy about it. He did admit that he had pitched to the Trump campaign and had a non-disclosure order slapped on him. So there was some commercial rivalry there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he did. He wasn't, he was never, he's not a deceptive person. He's not a liar. You can see there's some areas of discomfort. I think he's done quite a good job trying to account for them in the book. There are factual errors, which I think come from, from that prism of his own quite powerful, rational mind. What did he say about the pitch to the Trump campaign? I'm trying to remember.

I have got it on tape. It was kind of one of those things. Oh, maybe skip over that a bit. That's not helpful. Yeah, I think he was just touting around for business. And you remember that point, Trump was not clearly, you know, some people think it's still a Democrat. He mainly spoke to it and talked to it in terms of his rivalry with Nix.

The NICS then slapped an NDA on him. that his work was somehow proprietary to Kenya Junkwitz. I remember more talking about in terms that Nix was trying to shut down his business. So just for clarification, I sent four emails about this later to Peter Jukes, and he never replied to me. I think he figured out he shouldn't have said that. So I also got in touch with Corey Lewandowski, who didn't reply.

Mark Block, Mark Gettelson and Tadasiusikas never replied to me on very, very numerous emails. So I basically asked Wiley directly. So here's Wiley. So also in the book, right, I do talk about like Trump did approach us before he announced that he was running for president. I did not know he was running for president.

Any conversations that I had with people from the Trump organization were about the declining viewership of the apprentice and whether they could revive that brand and then also his hotel chains which were not doing well so

you know that so like I did talk to people did answer to this possibly but but the the issue that I have is that

we're sort of spiraling into a very sort of specific thing that my comment comment on that is almost so what, right? Yeah, so what? I mean, Anthony, what do you make of him and his denial here? I think overall, my theory is just that he knew that if we knew that he pitched the Trump campaign, it would look really bad.

It would undermine the whole story he wanted to pedal. And we're going to see a little bit later on that he was backed into a corner, but I don't want to spoil everything yet, but yeah, basically it's just like he got caught. A few days later, Alexander Nix also went on to pitch Cambridge Analytica's services to Corey Lewandowski. According to Nix, Lewandowski was surprised to be dealing with another British company from Cambridge. This raised Nix's suspicions, and he quickly found out about Unoya, which had companies now incorporated both in Delaware and Great Britain. Wiley and Yusikas were listed on the websites of several conferences at the time, as the CEO and CTO,

of Unoya. Suspecting that they had left with Cambridge Analytica's software code, he went into war mode and threatened to sue them. Unoya's co-founders, now under scrutiny by Nix, caved and signed an undertaking's agreement wherein Chris Wiley, as CEO of Unoya, agreed to stop using any software and licenses belonging to Cambridge Analytica's parent company, SCL. He also agreed to stop soliciting SCL's clients. Today, Wiley claims that he was only sued for soliciting a client, which violated his NDA

with SCL. The problem with this version of what happened is that in June 2015, Trump was not yet a client of SCL, so it really just doesn't add up. Regardless of who you believe, what's clear is that UNOIA would not be allowed to use the data, models, or software developed by Wiley's former employer. He was back to square one. Unoya would not be able to get anywhere if he couldn't employ the Mercer-funded, quote-unquote, digital treasure.

All of this paints a very different picture than the one Wiley would establish through his whistleblowing, of a man having ethical and moral doubts about what he did at Cambridge Analytica. Instead, after leaving the company, he would go on to pitch other far-right campaigns in an attempt to garner a contract for Unoya Technologies, this time in the UK. In early 2016, as the movement around Brexit was growing, Wiley got in touch with Dominic Cummings, who at the time was the director of Boris Johnson's Vote Leave campaign. Cummings posted their communications on his blog, and Wiley would go on to confirm that they were authentic. So here's that text.

Dear Mr. Cummings, it was a pleasure to meet with you a few weeks ago to discuss what we could offer the Vote Leave campaign. I wanted to make sure you received a copy of an in-depth technical briefing on psychographic microtargeting, which also includes a proposed pilot for your consideration. A bit later, Wiley writes, There are several possible inroads open to Vote Leave that we feel could yield a decisive, competitive advantage for your campaign. We hope that you find this document both informative and comprehensive but should you have any further questions feel free to get in touch with myself or Mark Gettleson copied to this email the prospect

of working with vote leave is very exciting for us and we look forward to continuing our conversation with you kind regards Chris in the pitch he sent to the vote leave campaign here's how Wiley tried to sell him on his idea by using similar language to what he had used to convince Mercer that big data would work in favor of the Trump campaign the Remain campaign the Remain campaign has already sought to engage several Obama alumni for micro-targeting. For Vote Leave to match remains imported know-how, it will also need highly experienced technical and strategic staff who are familiar with these methods.

However, we propose that Vote Leave leapfrog its competition by applying more innovative next-generation psychographic methods of targeting currently being trialed on several presidential campaigns in the USA. He offered to do panels, data collection, modeling, and telephone sampling for a bit over. over 57,000 British pounds. Cummings, however, opted not to work with Wiley and Gettleson. Here's how Wiley justified courting a right-wing campaign in our interview with him. Yeah, you prefer to test and improve newer psychometric methods

and do psychographic profiles of different groups of target voters in the campaign. Yeah. It sure looks like a lot what Cambridge Indica did. Yes and no, because when you use, would you use personality traits it is not inherently manipulative

if what you're trying to understand is how to frame something but there's a big difference between framing and misleading so in the in the correspondence that was sent to Dom Cummings,

you know, it's very clear that what was being proposed was a sample, right? So even, and I can't remember if he published the budget and the sampling, but, you know, a relatively small sample. And the timeline would have made it to do it lawfully. the timeline would have made it incongruent with the timeline of the campaign. I did that out of a favor because I met with him at the time. It doesn't look good for him, obviously, and it doesn't fit with his whole picture of himself as like this moral crusader at that point who would become disgusted with right-wing tactics.

It paints a picture of someone who's willing to work for just about anyone and who sees big opportunities on the right because the left has already kind of of pioneered this stuff through the Obama campaigns. And when he says it's not inherently manipulative, I mean, I don't get it. To be honest, it's like he's been saying for now four years and in the whole book that it is inherently manipulative. And now, just like when it doesn't suit him and his narrative, he says it's not manipulative. It's something I really don't get.

I haven't been able to understand why he says that. And you can see in, you know, his document that he sent to Dominic Cummings that he does kind of still want to pitch on this psychographic, you know, deeper product, essentially, that he's trying to sell them. So, you know, I think he probably knows that that's something that he can't fulfill properly and that what he would really do if he were hired is just the regular work that every other data firm could do. And that's why he thinks, well, that's not manipulative because it's just standard practice at this point. I think there's an element of narcissism here, which, which, you know, you tend to find in these young sort of start.

startup tech entrepreneurs, where it's very attractive to be able to say that I can predict the future of Americans' decisions. It's not just that like, hey, yeah, print out the stuff you've got, like, I can analyze the numbers and we can see where things fall. You know, anybody with a proper training and degree and skill set can do that. But to say, I have something that's unique. I have something that everybody is going to want. I mean, I think we really saw it in that in that text to Jeremy that it's sexy. There's something, you know, he thinks there's something sexy about this, this power that he can wield over companies that are desperate, desperate to figure out the best way to

find their audience, you know? It's difficult to decipher what Wiley meant when he said this, but it may well have been an attempt to muddy the waters with a convoluted answer. In any case, the only contract you Noya would sign was for a pilot project in 2016 for the Liberal Party of Canada, right after Trudeau went into office. This would not amount to much. The party chose not to proceed with Wiley past the preliminary phase. Gutter magic.

During this time, Alexander Nix was still riding high on the false claims that his company had delivered the win for Ted Cruz in Iowa. After the Texas Senator dropped out of the presidential race, Robert Mercer decided to switch his allegiance to Donald Trump. This allowed Nix's company Cambridge Analytica to fail upwards and magically secure a contract with the future president's campaign. We interviewed several ex-Trump 2016 staffers, as well as Cambridge Analytica employees working for the campaign, asking them about the company's role in their eventual victory. They all told us the same thing. The Facebook data wasn't really useful, as psychographics didn't play a big role in the campaign. Cambridge Analytica continued their attempts to create psychographic models after Wiley left,

but their failure to perform on the cruise campaign meant they eventually gave up using them altogether. Here's Dan Hong, the video editor for the Trump campaign. I think all of the digital magic that happens was not necessarily because of Cambridge or because of our group. All of those tools are available to the smallest advertiser. But Cambridge really was able to slice and dice up segments of the population. You know, the micro-targeting is not unique to Cambridge, but they did it very well. Because I've heard that Molly Schweikert and Matt Skalski were very important.

Are they the two main guys or are there others as well? Yeah, I would say that those two were the, you know, as far as that side of the operation, I would say that those two and Gary Kobe were most responsible for the direction and the implementation of all the plans. You know, Molly, Molly was very directly involved in the purchasing, like she got the data and said, just buy these ads here and obviously did it very, very well. And then Matt, you know, was in charge of the data team. Everybody we spoke to seemed to agree. Cambridge Analytica's value ad to the Trump campaign did not come from their psychographic

secret sauce, but from their hiring of two talented data scientists. Matt Uxkzkowski and Molly Schweikert. Uxkowski was a seasoned data scientist working in politics who had spent three years working as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's chief digital officer until 2015. As for Schweikert, we don't know much about her past, but she was described by our sources as decisive, smart, and level-headed. A BuzzFeed report from 2017, published more than a year before Wiley went public and made psychographics into a bad word, quoted 13 former Cambridge Analytica employees and collaborators. Here's a few excerpts.

Several people who worked directly with Cambridge Analytica told BuzzFeed news that despite its sales pitch and public statements, it never provided any proof that the technique was effective or that the company, had the ability to execute it on a large scale. Quote, any time we ever wanted to test anything as far as psychographics was concerned, they would get very hesitant, said one former campaign staffer, who adds, quote, at no point did they provide us any documentation that it would work. In marketing pitches, two GOP operatives recalled, Nix had claimed his company had access to proprietary information that includes Facebook data.

One of the operatives said the data was too old to be helpful and couldn't be updated. Others said they'd received a similar pitch, but Nix was too vague about the details for them to evaluate what the data really was. None of the campaign staffers BuzzFeed News spoke with said Cambridge Analytica's proprietary data had played a key role in any decision-making. And, more crucially, from the same article, rather than a sinister breakthrough in political technology, the Cambridge Analytica story appears to be part of the traditional contest among consultants on a winning political campaign to get their share of credit in win future. clients. Here's Molly Schweikert speaking about this at a conference in 2017. In the United States, we have a database that aggregates a few thousand data points on each adult in the U.S. sourced from publicly available consumer information, which

represents data points such as consumer information, lifestyle habits, demographics as well. On top of this, we then have first-party data from our clients, as well as large amounts of consumer research that we undertake in the field, which is then used as the basis for our big data models that our data scientists create. From here, this data can be used by our clients in a number of ways, one of which being targeted engagement through digital marketing, which we're here to talk about particularly today. Schweikert, who led the digital division at Cambridge Analytica, was openly stating that these

data gathering techniques were completely above board and widely available. The companies employing them, Axiom and Experian, were way more secretive than Cambridge Analytica ever was, and most big corporations in U.S. presidential campaigns use them in some way. What's so interesting about this is that the data these companies used was way more accurate and up-to-date than the psychographic methods that were supposedly used as black magic by the Trump campaign. They painted a much better picture of individuals than whether they liked Nike or the foo fighters on Facebook seven years ago. The information included what magazines individuals subscribed to, whether they were online video watchers on a scale of 1 to 10, the automaker they favored, and many other useful

data points. And this data was available on virtually any American citizen. It could be matched to voter registration data in an attempt to ascertain whether they were undecided voters. What this meant was that the data was perfectly legal to acquire and much more effective than whatever guesswork young psychologists were trying to perform based on outdated Facebook likes and a disputed personality model. In fact, a former Cambridge Analytica employee embedded in the Trump campaign said that the techniques they were employing were those used by just about

every political consulting data company out there. This company called Parskell paid us to run persuasion ads in battleground states, and the Trump campaign paid us to do sample biased correction on the polling to make polling results more reflective of what people were going to vote. We did modeling on undecided voters and then would feed this info onto a dashboard for key decision makers on the campaign to decide where to send the candidate for rallies. At one time, they'd do surveys every day. They'd update their audiences for digital ads once a week based on the surveys. This is one of the major unspoken aspects of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, that the Trump campaign simply hired competent staff who were able to deliver

solid work, and that Steve Bannon's supposed psychological warfare mind fuck tool was based on secret sauce that served little purpose beyond convincing gullible clients to sign contracts with data science firms. The whole thing was a marketing pitch. Cambridge Analytica was just one cog in an extensive digital marketing apparatus built by the Republican Party in response to their multiple losses to the Obama campaign, who were the real pioneers of so-called political micro-targeting. In many ways, Wiley's success is a whistleblower,

and the entire Cambridge Analytica scandal, was based on a faulty premise. To believe it meant to believe Alexander Nix's bombastic. marketing pitches and long-held habit of overselling his company's abilities. There had never been any data black magic involved, and everybody knew it, including Wiley, but it didn't matter. Because once attention was drawn to Cambridge Analytica, the company's very real shady pass would work in the whistleblower's favor. And it did.

Months after the story went public and hit all the major newspapers, the company was dissolved and the narrative stuck. The heroic Wiley had flipped on Cambridge Analytica and distilled. dismantled Steve Bannon's Machiavellian psychographic death star. It was the perfect story. And for liberals still in shock from the results of the 2016 election, it helped explain just how on earth a guy like Donald Trump could get elected as president of the United States. The only thing is, it just wasn't true.

Broken Story Carol Cadwallader, the reporter who broke the story for The Guardian, said she first heard of Cambridge Analytica in late 2016. Her first story was published in February of 2017, linking the Brexit campaign with Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer. Shortly after that, she got a lead about a company in Canada and first heard the name Christopher Wiley. Here's an interview excerpt with Cadwallader who never returned our requests for interview.

After that report came out in February of 2017, I got a lead about another company, a Canadian company with links to Cambridge Analytica, which traded as aggregate IQ. would talk to me initially, but eventually, someone cracked, and when he heard about Facebook data and Canada, he said to me, you need to find Chris Wiley. So I did. It just took me another year to help him get into a position where he was prepared to go on the record. Some months before this period, according to our sources, Wiley had beaten in Silicon Valley trying to get another company off the ground. Unoya was behind him at this point, in an attempt to leave politics for good. He had been introduced to a former employee of the Andresen Horowitz Venture Capital

firm, who ended up leaving her job to pursue Wiley's project with him. And then, right in the middle of all of this, Christopher Wiley basically disappeared. He stopped responding to emails, phone calls, and texts, including those from his new collaborator. His former friend Jeremy explained it this way to us. Weird thing was that Chris was supposed to start a company with a mutual friend of ours, and he disappeared off the face of the earth in June, July, 2016. Stopped responding to messages, was supposed to start a company with this friend, the friend who introduced me to him was getting worried about him.

It was fall, 17, and I was like, when all the Manafort stuff was dropping, I was like, what if Chris was a Russian agent? Wiley doesn't mention this new company in his book, claiming instead that he was in Silicon Valley trying to raise awareness around the issues he blew the whistle on. In this version of events, he claims to have attended a meeting at the offices of Andreessen Horowitz, a firm that had invested early money in Skype, Zinga, Twitter, and Facebook. Here's what, in his words, he claimed to have told them. Guys, you work for a major shareholder and board member.

Facebook needs to be aware that this is going on. They told me that they would look into it. Whether that actually happened, I have no idea. I messaged Andrews and Horowitz about this, and here's what a very pissed spokesperson for the company told me. Quote, no one ever had a meeting with him. We looked at all the registers and calendars, and there's no trace of anything. We don't know why he's lying about this,

but this meeting never took place. Wiley also wrote that in late July 2016, quote, Ken Strasma called me and said, now that we've lost, I'm going to see if I can talk with Hillary's data team. He asked whether I'd be interested in meeting with them to outline my suspicions about what was happening with the Trump campaign. Yes, of course I told him. But in the interview we conducted with

Strasma, the former Obama micro-targeting pioneer, he says the call never happened. I saw also a conference, you were together, panel in a conference called effective altruism that's right in August 2016

and at the time Donald Trump had just become the nominee for the Republican Party and Wiley in his book said that you guys talked quite extensively

at this time did he raise concerns about Cambridge Analytica when you saw him there no the like I had known that Cambridge Analytica

had become you know I identified with with right-wing politics and Chris had left at that time. But I think we were talking more about the current state of U.S. politics and modeling. And Chris had not yet made the decision to become a whistleblower with Cambridge Analytica. So if we sum up, Wiley was not able to work in the UK and in the US in politics.

So basically he started working for the data offshoot of Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party. And as we said, it was a very short stint. So what happens is, it becomes, in late 2016, he becomes the target of Carol Cudwallader's investigations. So my theory now became that Wiley decided to give her a bigger target than himself and created a narrative linking Rob Mercer, Steve Bannon, Russian people, Wikileaks, and also the two biggest political earthquakes of the decade. She and the Guardian, as I told earlier, never answered my email about this.

So once again, I asked the question to Wiley himself. I've had this sort of weird situation where on one hand, the same people go, well, he can't talk about the Trump campaign because he was never on it. But then on the same time, go, yeah, but he was trying to be on the Trump campaign. So you can't trust him. I'm not those people. Right. But what I'm saying is either way, right? So let's go with what he says.

I pitched the Trump campaign, let's say that's true. It's not, but let's say it's true. My point would be, so what? Because I came out, I revealed the evidence about what Cambridge Analytica was doing, including what I was working on at Cambridge Analytica, right? If anything, you know, engaging with the Trump campaign would, simply add to, like, what it is that I'm talking about, which is that there are broad risks to society and that people can, including... And I thank you. I mean, I'm honestly thanking you for this, but since you're not a simple bystander on this, since you didn't, like, happen to get the trouble of data about the company and revealed

it. No. Since you are, in some respects, the theorist and the architect of this, sure seems like you just in this if you look at it this way that you try to save your skin at the very last minute but by becoming a whistleblower sure but giving the media can I just ask can I just ask how would I be saving my skin at the time you may have been Carroll and one of those targets as the architect oh no but but but I wasn't so I mean but you would have been framed as the architect of this and

and publicly you would have been sure nonetheless you know when we get down a narrative where we start to nitpick at every

everything that a whistleblower does most whistleblowers the reason they are whistleblowers is because they know something because they were involved in something And so the sort of troublesome aspect of that narrative is that, you know, if we create an environment where we demand perfection from people in order to accept their whistleblowing or their evidence, you're not going to get many people coming forward, whether it's to the authorities or to journalists, with valuable information that can prevent wrongdoing from happening. I think it's right here about demanding perfection from whistleblowers. I don't think we, after all, Edward Snowden worked for an NSA subcontractor, right?

But when you backtrack a little bit, he was the architect of all of this, Wiley. He theorized it from a young age, and when he was backed into a corner and started being investigated, he created all these non-existent connections to position himself basically as a wizard and blame other people. As we said many times before, I think data science isn't wizardry, and this misleading narrative gave an explanation to people who did not want to see the real reasons behind Brexit and Trump. In October 2020, Elizabeth Denham, the Commissioner for the British Information Commissioner Office, published a letter to Julian Knight, the MP who chairs the Digital, Culture, Media, and Sports Select Committee. She'd just spent over three years investigating Cambridge Analytica

and had access to all their servers, which amounted to 700 terabytes of data and 300,000 documents. That's the most thorough, and to be honest, the only proper inquiry made into the events surrounding Cambridge Analytica. And it pokes giant holes in Christopher Wiley's story. Here's what the Financial Times had to say about Denham's conclusions. At first glance, her findings, which were released on Tuesday, dispel many of the accusations put forward by whistleblowers and digital rights campaigners over the course of 2018. Denham told a parliamentary select committee on Friday that, quote, on examination, the methods that SCL were using were well-recognized processes using commonly available technology.

The ICO found no evidence that digital marketing firm Cambridge Analytica and its affiliate SCL misused data to influence the Brexas referendum in 2016. And I can't stress this enough. It's the, I mean, these guys had the entire servers of the company. And it's an independent, public You cannot do better than this. You cannot do a better, more thorough investigation and independent investigation. Regarding the Facebook data, Denham's report correlates a bit more with Wiley's claims. The authority also noted the company had begun efforts to replicate the Kogan data on a fully independent and permission basis as far back as 2015. But the report cautioned that some derivative data persisted until it was deleted in 2017, a move signed off by then

chief executive Alexander Nix. The ICO, hence noted, quote, it is suspected that some parts of the original Kogan data may have been used in connection with political campaigning for the U.S. 2016 presidential election, albeit in modeled form. But Denham's report nonetheless argues that the existence of Cambridge Analytica's supposed psychographic secret sauce was questioned, even from within its parent company. Through the ICO's analysis of internal company communications, The investigation identified there was a degree of skepticism within SCL as to the accuracy or reliability of the processing being undertaken. They appear to be concerned internally about the external messaging when set against the reality of the processing. So basically this shows that once again it was a marketing pitch and that even inside the company they fucking knew that there was no secret sauce.

And Trump won despite of the data and the models. Of course, vote leave and the Trump campaign ran deceptive advertising. Worse, many of them were outright lies and used racist tropes. And sure, Cambridge Analytica was run by despicable people at SCL manipulated elections in former British colonies using questionable tactics on behalf of their shady clients. All of this is documented and undeniable. And yes, Facebook has a lot to answer for.

There's a strong case to be made that it should be broken up or outright dissolved. There's no doubt that its very lax privacy policies allowed for personal data to be scraped and used for years by thousands of companies. It is an unaccountable super surveillance infrastructure that has abused its power in many ways and continues to intensely lobby politicians across the aisle. But does that mean that operatives hypnotized hundreds of thousands of people to vote against their interests using old Facebook data and unproven psychological models with the aid of Russian connections? At best, believing this seems like a coping mechanism, and at worst, it's an incredibly contemptuous way to view the American electorate. But that's the narrative that Christopher Wiley would like us to believe. The upside to the Cambridge Analytica scandal is that Wiley did bring some much-needed scrutiny

of Facebook's practices. His coming forward has been useful in many ways, and the scandal helped shift the narrative around big tech. But as some skeptics have noted, Facebook's stock went back to its previous value less than eight weeks after the scandal broke. The hit was at most a superficial wound for the social media giant. And hey, as Wiley himself has stated, we should not ask our whistleblowers to be perfect angels. Edward Snowden worked for an NSA subcontractor after all.

But the problem with the Cambridge Analytica scandal is that Wiley peddled a considerable amount of misleading stories and went out of his way to hide some aspects of his background. And the repercussions for him were extremely minor. He now works for H&M as the Fashion Behemoths research director. what the company said in their communique announcing his recruitment. The 29-year-old will advise as a research director and help H&M Group improve its customer, product, and market insights. The communique featured a short Q&A with Wiley, where he stated that he took the position

to help the company become more sustainable. But it's worth considering that he's definitely still using data to observe society in silico, as he would put it. With the use of data, we can make sure our customers get what they want. Does it fit well, will the product last? With the customer-first approach, we can make clothes that our customers love. It seems that at H&M, he's basically doing the same thing he was trying to achieve with Cambridge Analytica, albeit stripped of far-right politics.

It certainly seems to have been a quick conversion for him from originating the idea to becoming an activist against it, to embracing it once more in a different context. So, when it comes to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we're left with a central question. Why did this story shake the world, and why did so many people adhere to it? In a September 2021 article for Harper's Magazine, reporter Joseph Bernstein wrote, The media narrative of sinister digital mind control has obscured a body of research that is skeptical about the effects of political advertising and disinformation. A 2017 Stanford and New York University study concluded that if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundreds of a percentage point.

This is much smaller than Trump's margin of victory in the pivotal states on which the outcome depended. In the same piece, Bernstein drew from the work of political scientist, Yarrow and Izrahi. It's possible that the establishment needs the theater of social media persuasion to build a political world that still makes sense. To explain Brexit and Trump and the loss of faith in the decaying institutions of the West, A common account of social media's persuasive effects provides a convenient explanation for how so many people thought so wrongly at more or less the same time.

It is a model of cause and effect in which the information circulated by a few corporations has the total power to justify the beliefs and behaviors of the demos. In a way, this world is a kind of comfort. So where does that leave us? Many liberals, rather than explaining Trump's victory through socioeconomic and political, factors have opted to paint his voters as monsters, or at the very least, a gullible herd.

In early 2017, New York Times journalist Nicholas Christoff wrote an article headlined, Trump voters are not the enemy. In it, he wrote, Stereotyping a huge slice of America as misogynist bigots is unfair and impairs understanding. Hundreds of thousands of those Trump supporters had voted for Barack Obama. Many are themselves black, Latino, or Muslim. Are they all bigots? Six weeks later, Christoph wrote another article, this time entitled, My Most Unpopular Idea, Be Nice to Trump Voters. In it, he explained the blowback he received from liberal voters after his first article was published. The torrent of Venom was, to me, as misplaced as the support for Trump from struggling Oklahomans.

I'm afraid that Trump's craziness is proving infectious, making Democrats crazy with rage that actually impedes a progressive agenda. Nothing I've written since the election has engendered more anger from. people who usually agree with me, then my periodic assertions that Trump voters are human too. Last year, historian Thomas Frank widened this analysis, explaining that Trump had become the only story that mattered to the liberal media. Here's what he said in French outlet, Le Monde diplomatic. The war against Trump simplified the world, repainted everything in simple, urgent moral tones. It made the news media into heroes, fighting on the front lines in President Trump's war on truth. Critical elements of the conspiracy with Russia hypothesis.

were never proven. Other elements were shown definitely to be wrong. Other examples of gravely inaccurate anti-Trump reporting came by the dozen. In a way, and to be honest, that was the most shocking thing to me, because I really did not work on conspiracy theories before that. I'd never done any sort of work on this. And what it showed me this work is that no one is immune when it comes to false narratives. You kind of basically, especially when you were journalists, to be honest, you think that you have this rationality, this objectivity, that you will not be manipulated by these sort of things. Or if you are, you're going to realize it very quickly and change your mind and because you're rational, right? I don't know if you guys remember in 2011

when Dominique Trostkan, the French head of the IMF, was accused of raping a maid in a New York hotel. Does that ring a bell? Of course. I mean, certainly for me, because, you know, I'm pretty French. Yeah, it was basically, it was the head of the IMF. He was accused of raping a maid in a New York hotel. And at the time in France, we were, I think, six months away from a presidential election in which Stroscan was clearly the favorite. He was going to be the next president.

And when the story broke, when you turned on the TV, you had a rotating cast of members of his central left party. And I'm talking about Congress people, about MPs, about senators, like not your second grade guy from the party. You had, like, very identified people who were saying it was a conspiracy and that the maid was a plant and that she was lying. So no one is immune, is what I mean here. Another important thing is, as a sci-fi writer and essayist, Corey Doctoro, often writes about, the idea that Steve Bannon weaponized Facebook is the best sell speech for Facebook and big tech. Why? Because it kind of plays into their argument that their technology is almost like,

as we said a hundred times, black magic. And if it's black magic, it's an even better argument to start buying ads on Facebook or Google or Instagram. If everyone believes that Facebook can deliver a presidency to Donald Trump, then everyone's going to start buying ads, right?

And also, on a side note, these narratives, they turn guys like Steve Bannon into evil geniuses. That's kind of how he's portrayed throughout the whole thing. And when you kind of know him, when you've followed him for a long time, it's just a dumb guy, you know? and that's basically how he's been portrait in the media

and he basically said that to me back in 2018 the guy at the pink hair it's all I never met that guy I have no earthy idea he's a fantasist right look I don't refute him because first I saw it's all in the government in the court system but he also makes me look like the biggest genius in human history so why I mean I'm like Darth Vader

I'm pulling you know build the swamp in like 2010 he never shows any evidence but he's got a great He's got great narrative. Also, one of the last thing is, I think it had a demobilizing and depoliticizing effect because Trump and Brexit can now be seen mostly as the thought of the tech industry or billionaires or Russians or an evil genius like Steve Bannon. It's not because the Obama administration under-delivered. It's not because the Clinton or the remain campaigns made huge mistakes.

It's not also because of structural and systemic problems in America or in the UK. It's because of forces we cannot. control. And as we all know here, forces we cannot control is the basis of conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theories, in my opinion, they sit at the intersection of real trauma and systemic deficiency. And basically, some of those who's been disappointed by systems over and over end up losing confidence in them. And they seek alternative theories to explain why their conditions are deteriorating. So basically, if we focus too much on Facebook and Google and Twitter, never get to the bottom of a larger question.

Why the fuck do people for for these conspiracy theories? And to me, the people who obsess over algorithms, they just demonstrate one thing, is that making the world a little better is not a priority of theirs. And to end my rant here, if the world really works this way, if you cannot ever change anything,

then you're just left with assigning blame online to the people you don't like. And that's maybe the worst result that comes out of all of this. I could not agree more, my friend. Quite frankly, Antony, your work was huge to me. You know, I mean, when we first sat in a cafe in Paris and you told me, you know, Cambridge Analytica, yeah, I think that might be a conspiracy theory.

And I was like, what? Yeah, and then we spent the whole afternoon at my apartment. Yeah. Showing you the clips. Showing me interviews, showing me all this work that you did. I mean, this has got to be our set of episodes that have the most interesting. interviews that have the most, you know, in-depth reporting behind them. So, yeah, thanks so much, Antony again for this.

And always it's a pleasure. And now, to close this potentially infuriating story, I think we should read an excerpt from Christopher Wiley's high school yearbook. In the probable destiny category, here's what he wrote. Politician. Well, that, or just another dissociative smear merchant peddling backroom hackery in its purest Machiavellian form. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Q&on Anonymous podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash Q&Nanonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month. You'll get access to a whole second episode every week,

plus our entire archive of premium episodes, plus access to series like Trickle Down and Manclan. Antony, where can people find you online and read your work? They can find me if they speak French and read French at Society magazine. It's a bi-monthly print-only publication. And it's very good. It's actually where I write and how I got this material. And I also am on Twitter at Anthony Montui, A-N-T-H-O-N-Y, M-A-N-S-U-Y. And what's interesting is, you know, you mentioned that, you know, Cambridge Analytica, you know, this entire research got you into, you know, the kind of concept of conspiracy theories and their power over people.

And since then, you've written an amazing book, which has yet to be translated into English, where, I mean, you spent time embedded with the negative 48 cult. You went and did like a real deep dive into American and French conspiracy movements. And yeah, I just wanted to mention that. What's the name of that book? It's called Les Dicidant. And yeah, I kind of went backwards into this. I went with the liberal conspiracy theories into the far right ones. And yeah, I would love to have this article about the negative 48 court translated

because it's like an 11,000 word like reportage I did with these guys. I spent a week with them and they opened their work to me and spoke at length with me. And it was fascinating. And yeah, if someone wants to have a read, I'm definitely open to send it. For everything else, we have a website, QAnonanonymous.com. Listener, until next week, may the deep kish bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy, it's fact. And now, today's auto queue.

I'm going to start with a story about how Cambridge Analytica came to be. And it all started with a conversation in the autumn of 2013 at Cambridge. And I was sitting in a hotel suite and a man came in and we started talking and I was told, you know, you have a client potentially and you need to have a chat with this guy. So he flew in from America, and we started talking, and he asked, so tell me, what do you do? And I said, the best way to describe it is I use computers to try to glimpse into the destiny of cultures.

And he sort of looked at me and grimaced and rolled his eyes, and he said, cut the bullshit, just tell me, like, what do you actually do? So what is culture then? And I remember this moment just so vividly because he was dressed with two shirts on top of one another, two Oxford shirts, as if he had either forgotten to take off the shirt before or that he was somehow trying to, I don't know,

keep everything and carry on and skip the luggage. He had just flown in from America. And I could tell that he hadn't had a shower and he had that sort of layer of grime that you get after a transatlantic flight. And he looked somewhere in between a disheveled madman and a divorced car salesman, who was sort of acquiescing to his inevitable corpulence. But this conversation stays with me because he spoke with a certain wokeness that I haven't heard except at places like Berkeley.

You know, he talked about Foucault. We talked about Judith Butler, the performativity of identity, the nature of our fractured selves. And he talked a good game. And I was like, girl, you've read some third wave shit. Cool. And so he then asked, so how does culture change then? And that's when we started talking about fashion trends, because at the time I was also researching

fashion trends. And we talked about the difference between Crocs on one hand and Chanel's little black dress on the other. And all of the variables that get put into making one quick and fast and regrettable and another enduring and iconic. And it was in this moment that I had the captive audience of an interesting and interested man. And we flirted with ideas that no one had ever really talked about. And it was in that moment that he was sold. But I didn't know in that moment sitting in that hotel room that we were about to destroy the world together.

And it was in that moment that I became icarus and I put on wax wings and I flew into the sun. And I dragged millions of people with me. And it was from this conversation, this folly, that the world then burned. So before meeting Steve Bannon, Steve Bannon,