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Steve Bannon tried to distance himself from the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Thursday, claiming: “I didn’t even know anything about the Facebook mining.” Bannon is a former vice-president and board member of the political consultancy, which he agreed he “put together.” He claimed to a conference in New York that neither he nor Cambridge Analytica had anything to do with “dirty tricks” in the use of information harvested from Facebook to make computer models to sway elections. Besides, he said, “Facebook data is for sale all over the world”. {snip} He blamed any “dirty tricks” on Cambridge Analytica’s parent company,...

People walk past the building that houses the offices of Cambridge Analytica in central London, March 20, 2018. Share WASHINGTON — Long before its controversial roles in the 2016 Brexit vote and U.S. presidential election, Cambridge Analytica influenced elections in Africa. The data mining company, under fire for its alleged use of 50 million Facebook accounts to shape campaign messages for then-candidate Donald Trump, also played a role in elections in Kenya and Nigeria, according to new reports. The company's first involvement in Africa dates to the general election in South Africa in 1994. That election marked the end of...

FLASHBACK 2014: Facebook caught manipulating users: A recent study conscripted Facebook users as unwitting participants during a weeklong experiment in direct emotional manipulation. The study set out to discover if the emotional tone of a users’ News Feed content had an impact on their own emotional makeup, measured through the tone of what they posted to the social service after viewing the skewed material. Nearly 700,000 Facebook users were shown either more positive, or more negative content. The study found that users who were given more positive news feeds posted more positive things, and users who were given more negative...

Germany is the latest country to demand answers from Facebook after it emerged data from 50 million users was used to inform targeted election campaigns. German Justice Minister Katharina Barley on Thursday called such methods “a danger to democracy.” “The European Facebook management [team] must submit a comprehensive position on the scandal to the German government,” Barley told the Funke MedienGruppe on Thursday, demanding Facebook representatives visit her ministry in Berlin. […] Barley’s comments came as pressure grew on Facebook from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic in the wake of a scandal involving British analysis firm Cambridge Analytica,...

Shortened title. Full title: ere's an open secret about Cambridge Analytica in the political world: It doesn't have the 'secret sauce' it claims As Sen. Ted Cruz mounted a bid for the presidency in 2016, a nascent, data-obsessed company presented his campaign with an intriguing proposition. It had a "secret sauce" that no other firm could deliver.

Is Cambridge Analytica going to be left holding the bag for Obama's Data-Mining? Is the Cambridge Analytica alleged scandal—in reality a bombshell dropped out of the blue by the New York Times and The Guardian’s Observer—now dominating the daily news, a desperate replacement for Special Counsel Robert Mueller III’s fading ‘Russians-Stole-The-Election’ investigation? It certainly fits the desperate, no-evidence special counsel need like a glove.

Cambridge Analytica, a data vendor for the Trump campaign, was phased out during the general election, CBS News reports. The firm is now at the center of reports that it exploited Facebook data and harvested millions of U.S. voter profiles without user authorization during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The co-director of a company that harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users before selling it to the controversial data analytics firms Cambridge Analytica is currently working for the tech giant as an in-house psychologist. Joseph Chancellor was one of two founding directors of Global Science Research (GSR), the company that harvested Facebook data using a personality app under the guise of academic research and later shared the data with Cambridge Analytica. {snip} Chancellor is still working as a researcher at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in California, where psychologists frequently conduct research and experiments using the company’s vast...

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden ripped Facebook in a tweet Saturday after the social media giant suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm which worked worked for President Trump’s campaign. Facebook accused the firm on Friday of not deleting data it had improperly harvested from Facebook users, which number in the tens of millions, but Snowden pinned the blame squarely on Facebook and lumped in other social media companies for being just as reckless. "Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as 'surveillance companies,'" Snowden said. "Their rebranding...

Jubilee has contracted the services of global data mining company Cambridge Analytica in the run-up to the August presidential election. The party will also use the British PR firm BTP Advisers that successfully managed the TNA campaign that brought President Uhuru Kenyatta to power in 2013. READ: Uhuru sets up six strategic teams to run his re-election Cambridge Analytica is credited with helping President Trump to win the American presidential election last November and with helping the Leave side to win in the Brexit referendum in the UK last June. It has been described as a "psychological warfare firm". CA,...

Theresa May wants to deploy an army of computerized “mind-readers” to help her win the next Election, sources claim. Tory chiefs have been in talks with Cambridge Analytica, the polling data experts credited with playing a key role in Donald Trump’s presidential victory. The British company, run by Old Etonian Alexander Nix, 40, uses computers to “mine” huge amounts of data on voters — including Facebook likes, favorite foods, TV shows and even football clubs. …

Ted Cruz's presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian can reveal. A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz's campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users