Episode 213: Rewriting Cambridge Analytica (P1) feat Anthony Mansuy
The Cambridge Analytica Scandal involves data science being described as potent black magic, claims of psychological voter manipulation in swing states, micro-targeting, secret meetings, massive amounts of stolen data and a seemingly nefarious plan to use Brexit as a blueprint and catapult Donald Trump into the White House. But we’re here to tell you that the existing and broadly accepted narrative often reads more like a conspiracy theory. We are joined by guest writer Anthony Mansuy, a French reporter for Society Magazine, who in this first of two parts helps us tell the tale of a social media behemoth, a libertarian hedge fund billionaire, a sketchy political consulting firm, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and a host of Russian figures.
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. There's also a long interview with Wylie himself and even one with Steve Bannon, who Anthony tracked down in Rome in 2018, just after the scandal broke.
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 and Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listeners, to Chapter 213 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Cambridge Analytica Part 1 episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Anthony Moncef, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we're starting a two-part deep dive into a subject most people think is settled business.
Embroiled in this story are a social media behemoth, a libertarian hedge fund billionaire, a sketchy political consulting firm, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and a host of Russian figures.
It involves data science being described as potent black magic, claims of psychological voter manipulation in swing states, micro-targeting, secret meetings, massive amounts of stolen data, and a seemingly nefarious plan to use Brexit as a blueprint and catapult Donald Trump into the White House.
You may know this story as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but we're here to tell you that the existing and broadly accepted narrative often reads more like a conspiracy theory.
To dig into this, we're joined by guest writer Antony Mansuie, a Paris-based reporter for French outlet Society Magazine.
You may remember him from Premium Episode 144 on the topic of French sovereign citizens.
Altonis 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, Altony 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.
There's also a long interview with Wiley himself, and even one with Steve Bannon, who Anthony tracked down in Rome in 2018, just after the scandal broke.
The evidence lays out how Wiley 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, 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 jump right in.
Rewriting Cambridge Analytica Part 1 Psychographics In March of 2018, freelance journalist Carol Cadwalader broke an explosive story.
It revealed that a British corporation specializing in electoral campaign management got a hold of 87 million people's Facebook data and was using it to build psychological profiles of the whole American population so that they could in turn manipulate them through ads on Facebook.
This company, called Strategic Communication Laboratories, or SCL, had created a U.S.
offshoot known as Cambridge Analytica, which was funded by secretive American billionaire Robert Mercer.
Under the leadership of Steve Bannon, it had delivered wins for far-right candidates in the U.K.
with Brexit, and also in the United States, namely Ted Cruz, and later, Donald Trump.
According to Cadwallader, Russian fingerprints were all over the operation.
The New York Times version of the story was headlined, How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions.
The Guardian went a bit further, I made Steve Bannon's psychological warfare tool.
Meet the data war whistleblower.
The main source for the pieces was a 28-year-old named Christopher Wiley.
With his pink hair, nose ring, and camo jacket, Wiley looked like a caricature of a hacker in a Hollywood movie.
And described himself as The Gay Canadian Vegan Who Somehow Ended Up Creating Steve Bannon's Psychological Warfare Mindfuck Tool.
The revelations made headlines around the world.
The next day, Facebook's stock plunged 24%, and activity on the platform decreased by a fifth.
Overnight, Wiley became widely known as the whistleblower responsible for exposing a data-related political scandal of massive proportions.
By 2019, he had published a book, Mindfuck, Inside Cambridge Analytica's Plot to Break the World, in silico.
In the sciences, the expression in silico describes an experiment performed via a computer simulation.
Here's how Alfredas Smelyauskas, one of the leading experts in the field of behavior modelization, which is key to in silico experiments, explains it.
Scientists have been doing that since the 70s, since computers appeared and computers were strong enough.
Scientists have been doing that Since forever.
And people were not concerned at all about this.
We, you know, as a scientific community, have been working on this for a very long time, trying to recreate society in the computer.
And, well, look, so if you want to say, like, how do we solve, you know, climate change?
How do we fix healthcare?
Whatever.
These are very valuable approaches to trying to find these problems because they deal with
changing culture. You know, changing behavior is basically changing culture, you know, as an
aggregate. When Christopher Wiley got banned from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp after
his revelations came out, he chose the Twitter handle @ChrisInSilico.
Chris in the computer.
He used the term again in his book to describe what he was doing at Cambridge Analytica, which didn't sound much like modelling climate change or the evolution of a pandemic.
By profiling every citizen in a country, inputting their personalities and unique behaviors, and placing those profiles in an in-silico simulation of that society, we would be building the first prototype of the artificial society.
If we could play within an economy or culture in a simulation of artificial agents with the same traits as the actual people they represented, we could just possibly create the most powerful market intelligence tool yet imagined.
Wiley explained that this nefarious project was that of far-right billionaire Robert Mercer.
He had simply been hired to make it a reality.
But what Wiley didn't mention in his book, and anywhere else really, is that this was a long-term project of his own.
In 2012, six years before he blew the whistle, Wiley was a law student at the London School of Economics.
He sent a thesis proposal to the University of Cambridge with the goal of getting a PhD in psychology.
It was titled, Cross-Cultural Forecasting of Political Behavior with a Dispositional Situational Model of Personality and Partisanship.
Here's a key excerpt.
If we are truly to understand the problem of voter disengagement, then we must take
this very human view.
As such, conducting research from a psychological perspective may be necessary to fill in gaps
left by models developed by political scientists or economists which have, to date, lacked
a deep understanding of internal cognitive and behavioral processes.
In effect, Wiley was explaining that to convince people to vote, it was important to study their cognitive and behavioral processes.
Years later, this is exactly what Cambridge Analytica would be promising its clients.
But how would this information be collected?
Wiley explained in the same 2012 study proposal.
Given the significant interest that the findings of the study could generate for numerous players in the political industry, The author is confident that financial and infrastructural support could be found.
Political parties, lobbies, polling firms, third sector groups, and consulting firms all have access to robust data collection infrastructure.
By piggybacking off pre-existing infrastructures of scale, financial, capital, human, and time constraints could be reduced substantially.
There were obvious ethical implications to Wiley's idea, which he downplayed a bit in the closing segment of his proposal.
The study will be collecting sensitive information about personal beliefs, personality traits, religiosity, and personal backgrounds, which could harm a participant if misappropriated and misused.
The potential harm could hold negative impacts in employment, socialization, marriageability,
economic loss, or the participant's fear of personal privacy.
With the right measures of data protection, the author believes the risk of misappropriation
and misuse of data would be low, but concedes that breaches of security, were they to occur,
could lead to significant harms.
The Pitch Alfredo Schmielauskas, our InSilico expert, is a software
developer whose research focuses on behavioral modelization, a scientific domain posing the
question, "How do you use past data to predict the future?"
That's what Alfredas did for a few years at Palantir, the secretive and controversial big data company created by Peter Thiel and partially funded by the CIA.
The work I was doing was based on what they call agent-based modeling.
So this is a computer discipline where basically you're trying to encode behavior of individual participants of the system.
So people, for example, consuming energy, people who are driving cars, whatnot, in this particular case.
So you're trying to encode that into an algorithm, right?
So you're basically creating synthetic people, you're building a simulation of that marketplace, and you let it run in the computer.
So you have thousands of participants, thousands or millions of people simulated by a computer, their behavior simulated by a computer, and they're trying to outsmart each other, right?
Those agents are trying to kind of outsmart each other.
And so you want to see what's the aggregate effect on the system, right?
You know, is the aggregate, is the total effect what you intend for the society, right?
So that was my background.
We have this data.
Let's not try to come up with rules.
Let's extract the rules from the data, right?
So let's put the data first.
Let's not imagine rules.
Let's not come up with physics.
Let's let the data dictate the rules.
Let's extract the rules of behavior by looking at how people behave on the internet.
And this is a very attractive idea, you know, and this is very in the field of computer simulation, you know.
So is the idea essentially, you put like a bunch of people's personal data, like, I don't know, what kind of car they drive, how much money they make, what kind of ads they click on, what do they order on Amazon or whatever.
You feed that data into a computer, and the computer essentially is like, okay, I will create millions of artificially intelligent, I guess, people, and then I will run a simulation of whatever you're looking for.
How many people are going to buy the PlayStation 5?
How many people are going to vote for Donald Trump if there was an election?
Am I understanding this right?
It's basically The Sims, you know, except like...
Except the sliders are based on, like, data they've stolen from you.
It's like, what if every sim started in a swimming pool and you took the latter away?
Actually, it's not even stolen for the most part, it's commercially available.
I guess we're gonna come back to it later, but yeah, it's basically recreating you, Jake Rokotensky, with your data exhaust, everything that's available on you, to basically make a digital version of you to see how you can be influenced.
But we're going to see that this doesn't work so well.
I was saying stolen more like in a general sense.
It's not right that this is commercialized at all.
So I meant stolen, you know, spiritually.
Anthony, if they ran that simulation on me, they would be like, well, it appears this young man has elected Peter Venkman for president.
Everybody is voting now that we've told the Sims to vote.
But this man has stayed in his bedroom and is just jacking off.
He has Ghostbusters on loop.
He has Ghostbusters children sheets on his bed.
This guy's a seven-year-old.
You must sell him Lego bricks or something.
Yeah, they would look at my data and they would be like, he's not old enough to vote.
He's not allowed to vote.
He's eight!
And you'd get only Fortnite ads or something like that, or Roblox.
In early 2013, Alfredis was pretty active in London's tech circles, and Wiley approached him after a conference.
I was part of, let's say, London's tech community, and I used to give presentations about behavioral modeling during meetups and things like that.
And through that, I got in touch with people who later became the creators of Cambridge Analytica, and one of them was Wiley as well.
And he approached me and said, look, help us develop.
this idea, you know, obviously, you know what you're doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
help us develop this idea. And so over a few drinks, and a few bars, I helped them develop,
like we're talking right now. So it was very similar to what I'm telling, I was telling him
back then, as I'm telling you right now, you know, in the previous answering your previous question
about, you know, how do you model behavior?
At the time, Wiley's study proposal at Cambridge University had been rejected, so he was trying to skip the experimental phase of his in silico idea and turn it directly into a company.
This, once again, was never mentioned in his version of the story.
Alfredo Schmielauskas quickly identified a problem with the project.
You can't experiment, right?
It's very hard to experiment.
I mean, there are polls and you can, you know, ask people about their sympathies to the political party, to a president.
And, you know, because you need a feedback loop, right?
You apply a certain targeted advertising and you say, "Look, does it have any effect?"
So how do we measure the effect?
And if it happens only once in four years, there's no scientific method to actually validate
if your approach has any effect.
It's way more complicated than just two or three guys with or without a PhD.
It's just not something you can do in two years.
So yeah, and then Chris decided that he's gonna quit.
He was so in love with this idea.
Now, before we explain what happened next, we need to talk a little bit about SCL, Cambridge Analytica's parent company.
It mixes behavioral research and strategic communication to handle political campaigns and influence operations.
The company was created by Nigel Oakes, a very posh British former DJ who once dated Lady Helen Windsor.
He once stated, "We use the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler.
We appeal to people on an emotional level to get them to agree on a functional level."
Basically, the job involves focusing on campaigns and messaging.
To perform it, you need to know how to segment the electorate and figure out the variables involved in addressing them during an election.
That's why there had always been psychologists working for SCL, and their job was to create surveys to gauge the moods and thematic concerns of a given segment of the population.
At the time, SCL had three branches.
The two main ones were the Behavioral Dynamics Institute and SCL Defense.
They had contracts with the Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defense.
For example, SCL Defense worked in Iraq and Afghanistan to help with the counter-propaganda efforts.
Mostly, it was about introducing psychologists on the ground to figure out the underlying motivations compelling people to take up arms against the U.S.
coalition.
The third branch at SCL was called SCL Elections, and it was an election management agency headed by a colorful character called Alexander Nix.
Chris Wiley was a man in a hurry, but his penchant for moving fast and breaking things was no match for Alexander Nix's.
A former Etonian who allegedly owned his own polo team, Nix is exactly what most people have in mind when they think of British aristocracy.
But despite his rectangular glasses, immaculately side-parted haircut, and Seville Row suits, the man's temperament more closely resembled that of a hot-headed con man.
A former SCL contractor told us that Nix, not even 40 at the time, might have bought his way into the company.
He explained.
His core characteristic is his utterly unwavering and imbued self-belief.
That's his key characteristic, this bulletproof sense of entitlement.
He can take any risk and do whatever and be invulnerable.
He's got that and balls the size of a planet and he's a very gifted salesperson.
A lot of it is just pure umbrella chutzpah.
He is clever but he's not a brain surgeon.
Although SCL Defense worked for big institutions, SCL Elections, created later, was actually a scrappy, somewhat isolated branch.
When describing SCL Elections, our source explained that it was practically living hand-to-mouth, always being, quote, one payroll away from disaster, and taking contracts in former British colonies, working for what he described as small fish.
Sometimes the company grew, only to shrink again when work dried up.
They could afford to do this, because they relied so heavily on contractors.
If we were having a bad six months, they'd lay off staff and tune up accordingly once they had a big contract.
It didn't affect them.
They had an ability to expand and contract accordingly, but none of these guys would be affected by bad times.
These guys are very rich.
It was always tongue-in-cheek, jolly japes and hijinks.
It was always like a PGA Woodhouse novel.
Most of the people who worked at the company were in their mid-twenties, behavioral psychologists with security background, or coming from King's College.
They did this to have these highly credentialed academically minded kids and a lot of it was for show because Nix would promise enormous things and then figure out how they'd be able to deliver.
He was always running before he could walk.
Just for fun, a former vice president of the company told me that they asked their most skilled psychologist just to evaluate Nix's personality and their conclusion was described to me as clinically a psychopath.
That's never good when you run your tools on yourself and it just goes psychopath.
The services that SCL Elections offered went far beyond behavioral research and campaign management, however.
They were also paid to do all sorts of shady things.
Anthony met with Sven Hughes, a former special operations guy, who told him, in 2010, how he was paid by the company to amplify accusations of rape concerning the Prime Minister of St.
Vincent and the Grenadines, and then went to St.
Kitts and Nevis to plan a bribe offer to the opposition leader.
As well as providing us with documents backing his claims, Sven Hughes agreed to be interviewed on the record.
And here's what he told us.
I believe that they were worrying that we weren't going to win the campaign.
It was a tough one to win anyway.
We were like 80-20 against when we joined the campaign.
But I was very confident on the ground that we were going to win and I could see the polling and I could see we were going to win by actually quite a large amount.
Some people from London or from Switzerland had phoned Lindsey Graham, the leader of the opposition, and made the leader of the opposition believe that he was going to meet a potential financier who wanted to buy a prime or wanted to donate to his party to help him fight the election because he was running out of money and trying to beat us and was running out of money.
And so he thought he was going to meet a financier who was going to donate to his party and then when he was
in power would be given prime St Kitts and Nevis cotition on real estate at a reduced
price. So it's basically I'll help get you into power and I'll give you a lot of money now and
then when you get into power you sell me that land at a reduced price and no one needs to ask any
questions. So I had to get someone to play the part, rehearse them, get it all organized and also
arrange the filming to happen. There was no forced security and you know it was literally me protecting
this person who was a friend of mine that I brought over flew into the country. You know
whenever you got a guy who is whispering in his interview so that people in the restaurant don't
overhear him you know he's about to describe some real under the counter shit.
Lindsey Grant, the opposition leader, took the bait.
A scandal ensued.
Here's how things played out for both SCL and the election in question.
How much did the company get from this contract?
In total, the contract was about $4 million.
Wow, so it worked.
This is, yeah, this is not data science.
This is like old-fashioned cloak-and-dagger, like, you know.
Yeah, but the whole story is what happens when these guys think they have like a Death Star with data science and psychology and stuff like this.
Yeah, so here you can see kind of the moral caliber of their operation.
And so it's like, yeah, applying this kind of, I guess, moral assessment of the world to data.
Can't go wrong.
Cambridge Analytica wasn't the first time Alexander Nix had tried to launch a U.S.
offshoot.
Here's a former director within the company who gave us a recorded interview, but asked us to transcribe his words so he could remain anonymous.
There was an S.C.L.
America that was set up as a... Ooh, I forget the guy's name.
But basically, Alexander hired a guy who ended up becoming a heroin addict.
This is true.
All of this is true.
So this guy was hired to push the S.C.L.
in America.
It turns out that he took heroin, and the whole thing obviously went south at that stage.
And there were other things to worry about.
And that's one of the reasons why S.C.L.
formally couldn't go back to America under S.C.L.
and had to choose a different name.
Here he is describing one of the offices they worked out of back in 2011 and 2012.
There's a place called Wilson Junction in the northwest of London.
It is the biggest fucking shithole you could ever imagine.
It's like where trains go to die, you know?
Like our office, rented office, was in Wilson Junction.
So there were three of us in a rented office in Wilson fucking Junction.
But already at that stage, we were already working for countries, you know?
In 2012, the tide was turning for the scrappy operation headed by Knicks.
A big contract had been signed with the health ministry in Ghana, and another for a presidential election in Kenya, where their client, Uhuru Kenyatta, ended up winning.
This created an influx of money into SCL elections, and gave Nix the opportunity to expand his offerings.
Here's from the former director again, who incidentally, would be the guy that ended up recruiting, Christopher Wiley.
We were also seeking to expand, which is why I'd hired Christopher Wiley.
Like I had to argue with Alexander Nix we needed that.
Because in terms of micro-targeting and everything else, like in terms of, you know, using psychographics properly, like, doing in reality what SCL pretended to do, and it was basically like, it wasn't a pretense, but it would allow us to really do stuff.
And so Alexander, at the same time, we got this Ghana thing.
He was also prepared to then take Chris Wiley on, which supercharged the America thing.
Because it wasn't just a potential thing, this was now a reality.
We could bring in exactly the kind of people.
So that was at the end of 2013.
As we mentioned earlier, Nix had a habit of overselling his company's abilities and then leaving his contractors to handle the consequences.
One example of this was SCL's supposed psychographic work, which on paper is the ability to segment the population not in terms of demographic characteristics like age, origins, or gender, but through their psychological and cultural backgrounds.
There was only one problem.
SCL Elections was not able to actually do that.
In May of 2013, with the money from the African contracts, Nix decided he'd go all-in on the U.S.
and get his slice of its $10 billion political consulting pie.
To do this, he figured he needed a great sales pitch and a competitive advantage.
And that's what led our source to post a job offer on W4MP, a social network specializing in British politics.
That is how he ended up recruiting Christopher Wiley for SCL.
We acquired Christopher Wiley's resume and job application from the time.
Here are some excerpts.
This past year I took time off from work so I could complete the final year of my law degree
at the London School of Economics without any distraction.
However, with my imminent graduation, I am looking to get back in the political game, perhaps
with SCL.
SCL elections is a rare find in the political world.
Your firm clearly values measured empiricism over the blindly accepted war stories typical of most self-professed campaign gurus.
Having direct access to senior national campaign directors in the U.S.
Democratic Party, I have seen firsthand the power of experiment-informed programs and
their impact on the past two presidential campaigns.
Enclosed with this letter is my curriculum vitae and a sample of some work I have done
to highlight my understanding of both theoretical and applied voter psychology.
If you and your colleagues think I may have some potential, I would very much welcome
an opportunity to chat sometime.
Sincerely, Christopher Wiley.
In his book, Wiley wrote that he had been recruited by SCL Group to "combat extremism
online" and that "the firm was looking for data people for some behavioral research
project involving the military."
Both these things are untrue, as the job listing is still easy to find online, and his own application only mentions the political nature of the work.
Altony asked his source to read Wiley's book and address his claims.
They told him that Wiley did absolutely no work for SCL Defense, which was the SCL branch that would have worked on anti-extremism campaigns.
This was confirmed by several other former employees.
Wiley's goal in making these claims seemed to be to divert attention from what actually happened.
Namely, that he'd been a passionate advocate for the behavioral approach, and that he actually brought the idea to SCL, not the other way around.
Starting at 18, Wiley had worked for the Liberal Party of Canada and claimed that he was pretty close to the digital teams behind the Obama 08 campaign, responsible for pioneering the use of big data in politics.
From 2010 to 2012, Wiley had worked for the Liberal Democrats, a British centre-right party, as lead advisor on data analysis and insights.
Here's what his resume said about that role.
When you read his book Mindfuck, you realize that the best and most vivid moments are the ones where he talks about psychographic models.
localized and rolled out one of the most sophisticated CRM systems in the UK,
tracking 50 plus million voters. Introduced best practice policies on the single citizen view and
the citizen lifetime value. When you read his book Mindfuck, you realize that the best and most vivid
moments are the ones where he talks about psychographic models. You really get the feeling
that that's his real passion in life, that his whole life project was to become sort of the
world's best pollster.
He just wanted to be really good at polls, knowing what people had in their mind, what they were like, basically the whole behavior encoding thing.
And I actually spoke with one of his high school acquaintances.
Her name is Danielle McQueen and she sat on the youth council in Victoria where they both grew up.
Basically what she told me is that Chris was already keen on doing surveys when he was 16.
So let's hear from her.
He was definitely one of the most involved, I would say.
Like, that's why I remember him.
And he really picked up on it.
And like, I think I read in a recent profile that he was a dropout from high school, and I didn't know that.
Like, I think I could be misremembering this, but I feel like he said that he was homeschooling or something like that at the time.
And you could just sense that he was really dedicated to it.
I don't know if that's because he didn't have a lot else going on, but it was something that he had the time and interest in.
Wiley wanted to use the five-factor model in politics.
If you're unfamiliar, the five-factor model is a system based on personality traits used by some psychologists.
The personality traits in question are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Wiley's idea was to use this model to craft different messages for different people.
Here's how he wrote about it.
A person scoring high in conscientiousness, for example, is more likely to do well in school.
A person scoring higher in neuroticism is more likely to develop depression.
Artists and creative people tend to score high in openness.
Those who are less open and more conscientious tend to be Republicans.
This sounds simple, but the Big Five model can be an immensely useful tool in predicting voters' behavior.
Wiley considered the five-factor model the key that cracked the code in his work for the Lib Dems.
Even though the party got smashed in election after election during his time there, and kept bleeding MPs and councillors for years after his departure.
In his mind though, the model was quote, the central idea behind what became Cambridge Analytica.
But there was an issue.
When the rubber hit the road, the idea simply didn't work the way he thought it would.
Wiley's idea.
Remember when on Facebook, everybody was taking quizzes like, which Friends character are you?
Or, 97% accurate test to reveal your personality?
Or, what house in Harry Potter would you belong to?
I actually do remember this.
Like, this was a huge thing on Facebook for a little while.
Yeah, and like everybody was doing it.
These examples are interesting ones.
Most of them were like, which color are you?
And like, you know, my like cousin would be like, I'm the color brown.
And what you didn't realize is that all the while, all your data was being scraped by some guy somewhere.
At the time, for some unknown reason, Facebook allowed the creators of these tests to siphon some of our data when we took the quizzes.
Oh my god.
I'm just getting the implications of this.
Oh my god.
Oh no.
So all the people that were like, oh, I hope I get Hufflepuff or whatever, they're using the way they answered and the questions are structured to be like, yeah, they I think that they're doing a Harry Potter quiz.
But we're actually figuring out which party they would vote for in an election.
Exactly.
Fucked up, dudes.
This was before privacy settings applied to Facebook Likes.
Everything was public.
Two psychology researchers, David Stilwell and Michael Kaczynski, took advantage of this and started harvesting Facebook data in 2007.
They ran quizzes like these to get large databases to use in their work.
So here's Stilwell speaking about that.
Basically in 2007, I was just finishing my undergraduate in psychology and I had nothing to do in the summer.
And Facebook released its apps platform in May or June and so you know that was the start of my school holidays basically.
I already had a PhD sort of scheduled and agreed to start after the summer holidays so I had a few months with nothing to do and one of the things that I did is I created this Facebook app It's a test that allows people to take a personality test about themselves and find out about their results.
So it's called MyPersonality and the gist is, you know, it's like, you know, many of the bad personality tests on the internet, you know, sort of a bit of fun, but the difference is this was sort of a real personality test using academic research.
So I used some open source personality test items to do it.
And, you know, I shared it with my friends and they shared it with their friends and it all took off.
And then eventually, you know, eventually millions of people did this thing.
I wasn't planning for it to be, you know, a research exercise at the beginning.
So people did the tests and, you know, they got their results and, you know, we didn't store any data.
Academics came to me over the next six months or so and said, you know, You've got this amazing data.
Can I access it for research?
And I said, well, we don't keep the data.
So they persuaded me to keep this data and to make sure that people knew about the data collection going on and that it was going to be used.
So we did that and, you know, over time this thing expanded and we added more tests.
Academics came to me and said, you know, I'm researching such and such and can you add a test for that?
I, you know, made them go out and get permission from the person who created the test to put it online.
And, you know, we expanded.
We ended up with something like 25 different tests.
So small note, obviously, when he says tests in American parlance, he would mean quizzes.
So, are you Esmeralda?
I mean, it's so funny to think back.
Yeah, which Disney villain are you?
I'm Jafar!
Yeah.
It was so big for so long.
Yep.
After having this data for a while, Kaczynski, who worked for Microsoft Research at the time and still will, started asking themselves a crucial question.
Can we predict someone's answers to the personality questionnaire based on their Facebook data?
And Facebook likes are easy to work with because either you like it or you don't.
So it's sort of zero and one data.
So they sort of put this research together and then we published this paper.
After this, Stilwell and Kaczynski kept working together on a variety of projects.
In 2013, they published an insanely popular academic paper, claiming that by analyzing just 10 Facebook likes, their algorithm could predict your personality traits better than a co-worker could.
To beat a friend's assessment, they claimed to only need 70 likes.
A parent or sibling?
150.
And a spouse?
300.
To do this, they used the five-factor model, assigning different personality traits to different Facebook pages.
There's very little research on personality prediction from Facebook likes, so we may have to take them at their word.
But there does seem to be some obvious flaws to the methodology.
First, as we'll see later, the five-factor model is far from being consensual in the scientific community.
Kaczynski was also the same guy, for example, who in 2018 published a study saying that his algorithms could predict your sexual orientation by just being fed pictures of your face.
This is essentially phrenology.
It's like I can predict you're gay by the shape of your head and face.
Or a bit like astrology even.
A study on the use of Facebook data for research by the Journal of Medical Internet Research, supervised by researcher Gunther Eisenbach, addressed a big flaw in the approach.
The challenge of using data shared publicly could be biased because of social desirability influences and other censoring by a given participant.
Studies suggest that both privacy concerns and the user's audience can impact self-disclosure on Facebook.
What this means, basically, is that who we are online is not a picture-perfect representation of who we actually are.
Our data obviously is very valuable, but it doesn't always say that much about us.
For example, Liking the brand Nike before or after their advertisements featuring Colin Kaepernick would substantially change the meaning of the action.
If you're a MAGA supporter and you like Nike on Facebook, what does it mean, really?
Did you forget to unlike Nike?
Do you just like Kaepernick that much?
Are you on the verge of repudiating Trump?
Data can't ever tell the whole story.
Sometimes the data's too old, and sometimes it's incomplete or fragmentary, and certain crucial aspects of people can just never be turned into data.
Stillwell and Kaczynski published a list of Facebook pages they claimed were high predictors of a given personality trait.
And this is where things get a little bit more questionable.
According to them, for example, liking Sarah Palin was the highest predictor of being satisfied in one's life.
Liking curly fries, the Colbert Report, and the page Morgan Freeman Voice meant you had a high IQ.
Liking Marianne Williamson and the Book of Mormon meant you were cooperative.
All of these questionable insights were used as proof that you could draw up psychological profiles of people based on their data.
I don't want to dismiss scientists' work out of hand like this, but And of course your likes are gonna give an idea of who you are, there's no question.
But saying that like a few dozen or even a hundred likes will make you more legible to an algorithm than a friend or spouse?
I mean it relies on an idea that human beings are like these two dimensional characters.
Maybe that's like how you would assign a personality to an NPC in a video game, but I don't really see how humans work like that.
Don't you guys agree?
Yeah, I mean I've liked shit that I've thought is dumb or cringy or whatever just because like whatever I want to give the person a like or a friend sent it to me you know a friend sent me their thing and you and you like like I think they you touched on that talking about social desirability you know choosing your preferences based on what you think creates the the most That's why social media is so attractive to folks, is because you can curate the exact outward image that you want to your friends and family, as opposed to letting them know who you really are, what's really going on, all of that shit.
Yeah, I mean, I remember joining Facebook when I was quite a bit younger, and I definitely curated my likes to look cool.
I would choose authors or movies that I was like, oh, this is going to make me look smart, or this is going to make me look kind of edgy or cool, like this musician or that.
Even if I didn't necessarily actually listen that much to the person, or watch that movie so many times, or even read all the books.
We do not endorse Jake's condemnation of Stilwell and Kaczynski's scientific work.
The cardinal mistake it seems like that's being made here is that social media is reality.
Yes.
And fuck them.
Fuck them for supposing that.
We do not endorse Jake's condemnation of Stilwell and Kaczynski's scientific work.
Nonetheless, Stilwell and Kaczynski's article made headlines all over the world.
Basically every major publication ran their own version of clickbaity headlines like "Facebook
knows you better than your spouse.
And the duo gave hundreds of talks on the topic.
And of course, that piqued the interest of many, many people whose jobs would benefit from understanding people's personalities.
Including, of course, Christopher Wiley.
He tried to buy Stilwell and Kaczynski's data and models, but they refused because he just didn't offer them enough money.
Wiley then asked Alexander Kogan, who at the time was Stilwell's PhD supervisor, to replicate their work.
First, Kogan created a Facebook quiz app and then produced models supposedly able to predict someone's five personality traits based on this data.
Then, he and Wiley reached out to Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is basically a way to get, like, cheap labor online.
And, had them collect the Facebook data of people who took these personality quizzes.
About 40,000 people's data was compiled, and with this sample, the team tried to correlate which Facebook likes were predictors of particular personality traits.
Here's what a former data scientist at the company told us about the process.
He requested to remain anonymous, so we modified his voice.
And so what that allows you to do is to come up with a model to predict your survey answers as a function of Facebook likes.
So it's like a mathematical model where if you say, I like tea, then this can predict that I'm an introvert.
But the input of Facebook likes, the output of survey answers, you don't actually need to know anyone's name to have this.
Now, so that's step one.
Step two of the thing that Kogan came up with was that for each one of these people who takes the survey, he could get them to consent to have the name and the Facebook likes So, to summarize here, 40,000 people were paid to take a test and granted access to their Facebook likes.
Now with these likes, the data scientists thought they had an idea of which likes might be good indicators of openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, and neuroticism.
But by taking the test, the 40,000 people also gave the scientists access to their friends' likes and their friends' names.
This ended up being 10 million people.
So these 10 million people's likes were fed into the model, which was then tasked with predicting their answers to the personality quizzes.
They then took this information and matched it with commercially available data on these specific 10 million people.
The result of this was that a set of sketchy data was fed into a model that was already an extrapolation of an extrapolation based on binary data that was often outdated.
The result, according to our source, is that it just didn't work better than random guessing.
It's worth noting here, however, that he might have an interest in claiming this, perhaps to get off the hook for being involved.
Now, here's what Alfredas Smilovskas, the former Palantir engineer and Chris Wiley acquaintance, had to say about the work.
The take that Cambridge Analytica effectively took was a very, very naive take, which said, look, let's just cluster people into certain stereotypes, and forget all this dynamic behavior, and forget trying to extract rules, and forget even simulating this behavior.
Let's just come up with psychological stereotypes, which are, you know, standard
and already, I think, expired theory in psychology, right?
So there are certain human traits, like introvert, extrovert, open, close, you know, things like that.
And let's just use these traits and try to extract these traits from data.
And let's just classify people using those traits.
So, you know, let's take data and let's say classify you as an extrovert, open-minded, I don't even know these models.
But these models, I think, from what I know, have been debunked in psychology.
I mean, they don't work very well.
Myers-Briggs, those types, the personality types This really hits home for me because I used to work in digital marketing for a little while, and I really hated it.
But one of the things that these big companies would do is they would have like a big contract with data scientists.
And specifically, the ones that I saw were all based on this Briggs-Myers stuff.
And it was so funny, just how kind of random it all felt, how kind of the entire taxonomy felt like it was, you know, at the end of the day, just like a kind of subjective evaluation.
But what it was really good at doing was selling the big clients on hiring you, right?
Because it was like, oh, wow, they've got like science behind this stuff, like They know why we're putting the color yellow in this ad, and they know why we chose this actor over this actor, or this line over that line, or decided that it would be shorter or longer.
And so, yeah, the result was that it was an insanely good pitch.
And I remember watching these guys talk in meetings and being like, oh, great.
And I just took a bunch of those talking points.
And when we were trying to sell a new client for our agency, I would just use those talking points as if we were really applying this behind the scenes.
And we'd get contracts.
And then at the end of the day, the creative didn't really communicate that much with these actual, like, supposed scientific findings.
It was really just, like, a kind of upfront pitch.
I remember this first-hand.
From Alfredo's perspective, these techniques were nothing new, and were already being used in commercial settings.
But politics and commercial persuasion don't work the same way.
Here's from Alfredo's again.
Politics is beyond just buying shoes or something like that.
I don't know if it has been done as well.
to form affiliations with political parties, I think it's a little bit more complicated than
just shopping behavior. But to see how Facebook is actually effective with that, it would be
interesting. But I don't know if it has been done as well.
I don't think so. It's a big question if it is an effective tool to do that, because I think it
might be the case that your political or cultural behavior relies on more factors than just the ads
that you see on Facebook.
The thing is, Cambridge Analytica's clients were also claiming that the psychographic models weren't of any use.
They described them as effective marketing pitches for Alexander Nix, instead of useful tools to manipulate people through Facebook ads.
Here's what Alex Kogan said in a testimony to the UK Parliament.
I believe the project we did had little to no use for someone wanting to run targeted ads on Facebook.
The Facebook ads platform already provided SCL with many tools that run targeted ads with little need for our work.
In fact, to this day, the platform's tools provide companies a far more effective pathway to target people based on their personalities than using personality profiles for Facebook users developed by myself and my fellow social psychologists.
A report by CNN said that officials in the Ben Carson presidential campaign, which hired Cambridge Analytica in 2015, were unimpressed.
A Mother Jones article explained that, quote, Antony also spoke at length with Rick Tyler, who at the time was leading Ted Cruz's digital campaign.
He explained that the website they built for the Cruz campaign wasn't even ready in time for his campaign announcement.
Here's what Tyler told us.
Cambridge Analytica charged a premium for psychographic analysis, and they overpromised a lot for this.
Basically, they told us they understood people's personalities, how they want to be approached.
We took different approaches with different subgroups to figure out what worked best, and their tests were performing similarly to ours.
What we were paying a premium for didn't work.
It could have been any other company at that point.
More specifically, the campaign started using psychographics in December 2015 in Iowa, when Cruz was polling at 28%.
In February 2016, he won the primary with 27.6% of the vote.
So, if anything, they lost 0.4 of a percent.
In February 2016, he won the primary with 27.6% of the vote.
So, if anything, they lost 0.4 of a percent.
Great stuff.
Despite this, Alexander Nix went on a media tour taking credit for the victory.
What he didn't mention is that the work had made little tangible impact and that most of the contractors embedded in the cruise campaign had long been laid off.
As we mentioned earlier, by the time he answered SCL Elections job posting, Christopher Wiley was still trying to figure out if he could spin his precious idea into his own company.
He'd surrounded himself with about a dozen people, including Alfredas Smilavskas, who you heard from earlier, but also Brent Klickard, Mark Gettleson, Tadas Jusikas, and Alex Taylor, all of which became more or less important characters in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
These figures were all either psychologists, data scientists, or communications experts.
Here's our anonymous source that you've already heard from.
They were mapping out plans on a whiteboard and coming up with an imaginary company and just fantasy stuff, like who was going to be on the board of directors and where they were going to get the investment from.
Actually, I can remember them trying to take a couple of calls, screening calls with VCs, but they never went anywhere.
But yeah, so that was sort of their pipe dream.
By this time, Wiley had also met Jeremy, who would become a very good friend of his.
Jeremy, to be clear, is not his real name, and he spoke to Antoni on the condition that we protect his anonymity.
So here's what he told us.
I was in London for a talk and a mutual friend introduced us on the basis that we were college dropouts.
I was back in London in December 2013 and spent a day with them brainstorming and how they were going to spin this company out.
That's the first time I recall Chris's head spinning on, quote, From the place he was still the hero in that story, of course.
He wanted to spin up an arrangement like, the data was owned by a consortium of universities, so he could wrestle it away from being owned by Mercer.
The thinking was, if we can raise a few million seed rounds, we could go and do this on our own, and not be beholden to SEL and the Mercers.
Argus is the name he was using for the company he wanted me to help him with.
He thought the actual name should be Panopticon.
So there's great names for a company that's not going to end up being evil.
Literally like, yeah, we want to call it that room in Batman where the guy's looking at all the screens, but it's going to be for good.
Here's how Chris Wiley described Argus slash Panopticon in DMs to Jeremy.
Our goal is to first make an extremely profitable company.
Then, we cleanse our souls with other projects, like using the data for good rather than evil.
But evil pays more.
And evil can be sexier.
Winky face emoji.
He goes on.
You could combine all their data exhaust to create a supermodel of behavior and apply hyper-targeting compliance gaining techniques to make people buy stuff!
Oh, we live in such hell.
This is such hell.
Yeah, it sounds like someone who's on a good path to becoming a great person and not someone who's immediately seduced by the evil.
I know, what is this thing?
It's like they feel like they have to just say that they want to use it for good so that people don't think that they're just super evil, but he can't even help himself.
He's like, evil pays more and it's sexier.
Why even add that it's sexier?
Because he's in private DMs to a friend.
He's not writing his book.
This is not the stuff in his book.
The stuff in his book is very much that earlier thing about how we're doing it for the good and we're trying to make it good and it's gonna happen anyway so it might as well be us and we'll make a good version of it.
Wiley's holy grail was the single customer view, a form of software that a firm could use to have what Wiley calls, quote, a truly holistic view of each individual customer in a market.
This quote is an excerpt of a pitch to investors that was created in 2013 for his company, Argus.
Wiley never mentioned it, perhaps because the subtitle for the document was very telling.
Creating a holistic single customer view by mining online and consumer data as well as psychologically profiling individuals.
In October 2013, just after meeting Jeremy, Wiley began working on a pilot project for SCL.
He wanted to apply the single-customer view to the entire American population, and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer thought this was a great idea.
They did a test case on Ken Cuccinelli's campaign, a Mercer-backed candidate for Virginia governor who wanted to ban oral and anal sex.
See, man?
You can't even suck each other off anymore, man!
Fuck you, Cucinelli!
What the fuck?
That's- Those are the small pleasures in life.
Sucking and being sucked.
Shame on you.
In Our Work in Virginia, the paper Wiley sent to Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer about their research on the Cuccinelli voters, there's a segment he chose not to mention in his book.
Here's what it said.
We are confident that we can begin to catalyze the needed change within the American conservative movement, but we are not naive to the scale of that task.
This is why we need to start now and move fast.
If the GOP fails to appreciate this, it will lose an entire generation of voters to the Democrats.
When you look at it, in a way, with some hindsight, it's crazy when you see what happens next.
Because, like, this is 2013, so it assumes that you have digital campaigns and this is the only thing that can get someone elected.
That Obama got elected solely because of his micro-targeting efforts.
That Trump also only won because of this.
And when you just zoom out a little bit and just look at real life, it has absolutely no basis in anything except a fanatical belief Yes.
Yeah, honestly, this is kind of Hillary Clinton's big mistake, is that she also kind of bought into this, and she's like, we're going to micro-target soccer moms, and then Trump just fucking busted down the front door.
There's really something to be said about the belief that data science is black magic.
There's this deep down thing in us, in humans, to want to believe in transcendental things like magic.
But we always modify these beliefs to match the technological environment we're in.
And yeah, this is exactly it now.
We have this thing that we do not understand because it's too complicated for us.
And so we project this age-old thing onto it.
Robert Mercer, the rich guy in question, took the bait and decided to invest $15 million into the project.
On December 31, 2013, Cambridge Analytica was incorporated in Delaware.
The next day, Chris Wiley signed a six-month contract.
With the mission of creating Project Rippon, drawing from the name of the small Wisconsin town where the Grand Old Party was born.
Here's what he said about his employer in DMs to his friend Jeremy.
The advantage of working at a psychological warfare firm is that you get to see secret psychological techniques, haha.
In a nutshell, I want to create the NSA's wet dream, tongue out emoji, but with, you know, letters.
It's not the actual emoji.
We also talked with Russian gazillionaires who want to take us bear hunting in Russia to discuss.
I guess I've been working for evil clients for too long.
Haha, my current firm is mega sketchy psychological warfare, coups and shit.
Your government pays us to do dirty work.
Oh, this guy is, he's a, he's, he loves that he's like, he just loves it.
He's like, oh my God, like, dude, they're in these like fucking like Russian oligarchs.
Like they've probably killed people.
Maybe they'll ask me to kill somebody.
I don't know.
I blame this on Canada being so boring that like the world is going to end because Canadians want to feel naughty.
But to be honest, I don't know if he's bragging or if he's telling the truth.
Because Jeremy told me that on the one hand, he might feel that what you just read, Jake, might be bullshit.
But on the other hand, he told me a story where he went to a club in London with him once.
And while he told him to stay silent, because the club they were going to, it was used to him bringing Russian clients and giving them like the five-star treatment.
So, I don't know.
But I haven't been able to scratch the surface on this.
impossible to get closer to. But I do think Wild is full of shit here to be honest and I don't
think there was any bear hunting trips and we must remember he's 24 at that time. He's only 24.
Yeah, yeah. Haha, evil is sexy, haha.
And there's this idea that you're a part of something big even though it's bad.
Like, man, dude, I'm a part of coups and shit.
I mean, I do this shit with my own friends and family when I talk about going undercover to, you know, the QAnon events.
You know, it sounds sexy.
You know, we dress up, we wear disguises, we wear wires.
You know, it's, you know, in casual sort of party chat, you know, you want to sound like you're living a dangerous life, that you're on the edge.
You know, there's something attractive about that to people, so... Whereas the reality was that we used Jake to honeypot Liz Kroken and he had to have, um, long romantic nights.
And you eat, like, greasy burritos and you feel bad the whole time and... Yeah, yeah.
In DMs, Wiley also spoke more or less directly about Robert Mercer to Jeremy.
"I just want a $15 million contract.
I can pull in investors because I do it for my current firm.
It's a six-month gig and we can secretly test our shit on U.S.
consumers at scale, on tens of millions of consumers.
Some clients are libertarian billionaires in the U.S.
They want to get some people elected.
Alas, I can't pitch them because conflicts of interest.
Here's Steve Bannon in an interview with Antony back in 2018 for a story he did about him in Society Magazine.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal had just erupted, and Bannon was under investigation.
Rahim Kassam, who was one of his handlers at the time, said that the topic was out of bounds for the interview.
But Bannon just couldn't resist.
He explained the reasoning behind investing in Cambridge Analytica as part of what he described as a broad strategy for the alt-right.
So here's Steve Bannon.
After 2012, three things I knew we had to have, components to build this thing going forward.
A media platform, right?
And I partnered with Andrew back in 2009.
And we raised financing in 2011 and we're building the old blog site.
Do you want sparkling or still?
I don't mind.
Can we get a bottle of each?
And can I get like a triple espresso and some hot water so I can make an Americano?
A double espresso but then hot water and I'll make my own Americano.
In fact, make it a triple.
Make it a triple.
Three shots.
You guys want anything else?
You good?
So, the three elements I knew we needed was that you needed an investigative arm, which is government accountability.
Peter Schweitzer.
The Breitbart site to be stood up, which he stood up in early 2012, is a new site for the right wing and needed an ability to really do polling or online.
Oh man, I recognize my fellow sober guy.
Yeah, I'll take a triple espresso.
Yeah, breaking news.
Steve Bannon's drug of choice, caffeine.
To be fair, when you ask for an Americano in Rome, you get less than one inch of coffee, so I kind of get it.
There's a man who's been to Rome before.
Yeah, I love the guys like, va bene, va bene, yes.
Yes, Mr. Bannon.
We'll get you anything you want.
I didn't cut it because I knew you guys would love it.
Yeah, of course.
I love that shit.
Just a French reporter in Italy talking to Steve Bannon.
Va bene, va bene.
Just for some context, at the time, Bannon was planning to come work in European politics because he'd just been kicked from the White House by Trump.
I think it was because he talked too much to one reporter about one of his sons.
And so, the Cambridge Analytica scandal just broke, so we didn't know what was going on.
And I just wanted to know if we were about to get our own Cambridge Analytica in Europe.
Here's Steve Bannon again from that interview.
You used to have ties with Cambridge Analytica.
Yeah, yeah.
Can we imagine bringing some sort of new Cambridge Analytica, you bringing it to these, the techniques, to these parties in Europe you're working with?
The techniques, you've got to remember, the techniques... Is it something you're offering them?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
What I would help to do, the techniques of this are fairly well known.
This is my point, don't, there's a...
You've got some events, right?
No, there's a complete misunderstanding of the sophistication of this stuff, right?
It's not that... Remember, people vote on emotions, right?
They vote on emotions, not rationally.
There's a huge misconception of how sophisticated this stuff is.
Like the Cambridge stuff on the psychodynamic side... I'm not even bringing that up.
No, no, no, my point is that's bullshit.
That's the Holy Grail.
of the commercial world to be able to do that, to be able to find out exactly what makes you tick, right, and be able to change you like a lab rat.
That may or may not work, but it's probably 10 or 15 years down the road.
The difference is you have a couple basic simple messages in a messenger like Trump.
It's very simple.
This is the thing people miss.
There's two important things.
In the digital world, the analog is more important.
It's just more important.
They mocked and ridiculed us on Our Greatest Weapon.
Our Greatest Weapon was Trump in these fucking rallies.
The human element of it was so intense.
Damn.
Yep.
Old Stevie Boy.
Per his contract, Wiley left Cambridge Analytica after only six months.
But as a whistleblower, he would claim otherwise.
Here's what he wrote about his time there in his book.
It paints a very different picture than these private conversations he had with his friend Jeremy.
Looking back, I struggle to understand how I could have stayed even that long.
Every day, I overlooked, ignored, or explained away warning signs.
With so much intellectual freedom, and with scholars from the world's leading universities telling me we were on the cusp of revolutionizing social science, I had gotten greedy, ignoring the dark side of what we were doing.
I had let Nix dominate me.
I let him pick away at every insecurity and vulnerability I had.
And then, In service to him, I picked away at the insecurities and vulnerabilities of a nation.
My actions were inexcusable, and I will always live with the shame.
In his book, Wiley explained that he left at the end of 2014, whereas documents and other sources point to a departure in July of that year.
So why did he lie about this?
Here, again, is a former executive-level person at the company.
Probably because...
He wants to make it sound like he was there for as long as possible, to disguise the fact that he was only there as a pot-type person for about six months.
A lot of the stuff that he talks about, like going away on the midterms and doing these focus groups and all this type of thing, that was all Mark Gettleson.
Remember 2012, when Wiley wrote in a study proposal that he wanted to piggyback off pre-existing infrastructure?
So I guess he's taken a bunch of Mark Gettleson's experiences and he's transplanted them into
his own.
Remember 2012, when Wiley wrote in a study proposal that he wanted to piggyback off pre-existing
infrastructure?
Is it possible that he did exactly that and left Cambridge Analytica not for any ethical
reasons, but because he wanted to make more money by working for himself?
There's certainly plenty of evidence to support that thesis, and we'll be looking at that
in next week's QAA.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
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Anthony, why don't you plug your work and where people can find you?
You can find me, if you read French, at Society Magazine, my employer, and I'm on Twitter.
You can always send me DMs and follow me.
Anthony Mansui.
A-N-T-H-O-N-Y M-A-N-S-U-I.
For everything else, we've got a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep quiche bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
How's that?
That's perfect.
Okay, so here is recording.
So, what did you hope to achieve with writing this book?
Um, well, I think, um, you know, I, I saw, um, I saw a lot of things in my experience, um, both sort of during my time, um, at Cambridge Analytica and then also after in terms of testifying and whistleblowing and all of that.
And I feel like there's a lot of things that I learned, um, about Once were fairly obscure topics, now I think are becoming slightly more mainstream.
But I wanted to share some of the insights that I got from my experience with people.
Particularly given that when you look at 2016 as sort of a moment in time, it's sort of where the world kind of turned upside down.
