In a nutshell: Christopher Wylie comes forward to give us a clearer picture of what Cambridge Analytica is and how they played a role in influencing the 2016 Presidential Election.

People you should get familiar with:

• Christopher Wylie - whistleblower and millennial data scientist who worked for Cambridge Analytica

• Robert Mercer - US hedge-fund billionaire, Republican donor and Cambridge Analytica’s investor

• Steve Bannon - former executive chairman of Breitbart News and White House Chief Strategist

• Alexander Nix - CEO of the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica

• Michal Kosinski - psychologist and data scientist; coordinates the myPersonality project

• David Stillwell - Deputy Director of The Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge; programmed the Facebook application called myPersonality

• Thore Graepel - Associate of The Psychometrics Centre; alongside Kosinski, and Stillwell co-wrote 'Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior'

• Aleksandr Kogan - Owns Global Science Research (GSR) and amassed data on millions of Americans from a Facebook app called thisismydigitallife

Big players:

• SCL Group - one of their subsidiaries, SCL Elections, would create Cambridge Analytica, funded by Robert Mercer.

• Cambridge Analytica - a data analytics firm who worked for Trump's campaign and aided him in winning the election

• Global Science Research (GSR) - led by Aleksandr Kogan, GSR harvests and processes mass amounts of Facebook data

The story:

• Michal Kosinski & David Stillwell, psychologists at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre, learn how to quantify personality

• Stillwell, develops a Facebook app called myPersonality, and it goes viral

"...it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked ‘I hate Israel’ on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats." (The Guardian, 3/18/2018)

• Boeing funds Kosinski’s research and a government agency called DARPA ("Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency"), cited in articles supporting Kosinski’s work

• Wylie is connected to the SCL Group through the Lib Dems (i.e. liberal political party in the United Kingdom)

• Alexander Nix, CEO of SCL Elections (subsidiary of SCL Group) at the time, offers Wylie a job

• In 2013, Wylie meets Steve Bannon, then editor-in-chief of Breitbart

What was he [Steve Bannon] like?

"Smart," says Wylie. “Interesting. Really interested in ideas. He’s the only straight man I’ve ever talked to about intersectional feminist theory. He saw its relevance straightaway to the oppressions that conservative, young white men feel. 'Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point [Bannon] was looking for.” (The Guardian, 3/18/2018)

• Wylie is exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”

• Bannon proposes an idea to Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, 'cyberwarfare for elections'.

• SLC/Cambridge Analytica (essentially the same thing) makes a business deal with Global Science Research (GSR) to amass Facebook data from millions of Americans.

"It was Bannon’s interest in culture as war that ignited Wylie’s intellectual concept. But it was Robert Mercer’s millions that created a firestorm. Kogan was able to throw money at the hard problem of acquiring personal data." (The Guardian, 3/18/2018)

• Kogan developed an app, called thisismydigitallife, which gives him permission to access users Facebook profiles and their friends' for academic purposes only.

"Cambridge Analytica had its data. This was the foundation of everything it did next – how it extracted psychological insights from the “seeders” and then built an algorithm to profile millions more." (The Guardian, 3/18/2018)

• Research reveals that Kogan has received grants from the Russian government to research “Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks”.

"There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: “We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that “they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections” but that they were “failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers”. The work, he said, would be “shared with the CEO of the business”, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov.... There’s no evidence that Cambridge Analytica ever did any work for Lukoil. What these documents show, though, is that in 2014 one of Russia’s biggest companies was fully briefed on: Facebook, microtargeting, data, election disruption...Russia, Facebook, Trump, Mercer, Bannon, Brexit. Every one of these threads runs through Cambridge Analytica." (The Guardian, 3/18/2018)

This story is catching steam.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/cambridge-analytica-alexander-nix.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43465968
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2018/03/19/what-did-facebook-know-about-cambridge-analyticas-work-and-when-did-it-know-it/?utm_term=.a9c7e58e6ceb