[SIZE=7]Cambridge Analytica ran voter suppression campaigns, whistleblower claims[/SIZE]
By Donie O’Sullivan and Drew Griffin, CNN
Updated 6:33 PM ET, Wed May 16, 2018
[SIZE=5]Whistleblower: Facebook acted when I spoke out[/SIZE]
Washington (CNN)The whistleblower whose disclosures about Cambridge Analytica shook the tech world over questions about users’ data privacy told Congress on Wednesday that the company engaged in efforts to discourage or suppress voting.
Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who blew the whistle on its alleged misuse of Facebook data, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the company offered services to discourage voting from targeted sections of the American population.
“Mr. Bannon sees cultural warfare as the means to create enduring change in American politics. It was for this reason Mr. Bannon engaged SCL (Cambridge Analytica’s parent company), a foreign military contractor, to build an arsenal of informational weapons he could deploy on the American population,” Wylie claimed, referring to Trump’s former top political adviser Steve Bannon.
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180516115633-01-christopher-wylie-congress-0516-restricted-large-169.jpg
Christopher Wylie swears in to a Senate Judiciary Committee
Wylie did not provide specific evidence of voter suppression campaigns taking place in the US. But when asked by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware, if one of Bannon’s “goals was to suppress voting or discourage certain individuals in the US from voting,” Wylie replied, “That was my understanding, yes.”
After the hearing, Wylie told CNN that although he did not take part in voter suppression activities, he alleged that African-Americans were particular targets of Cambridge Analytica’s “voter disengagement tactics,” which he said were used to “discourage or demobilize certain types of people from voting,” and that campaigns and political action committees requested voter suppression from Cambridge Analytica.
CNN has reached out to Bannon for comment.
[SIZE=5]Alleged Russian ties[/SIZE]
Wylie also outlined during his testimony how he believed it may have been possible for the Facebook data of American voters to have been obtained by entities in Russia.
Wylie highlighted how Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan – who has told CNN he gathered information on 30 million Americans through his Facebook personality test app in 2014, which he then passed to Cambridge Analytica – made numerous trips to Russia, in part a result of his work with St. Petersburg University. <