The Big Story

David Carroll Cambride Analytica Gallery

  • Portrait of Alexander Nix
    TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images
    01
    Alexander Nix, ex-CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was captured on camera by Britain’s Channel 4 News, discussing using tactics like extortion and bribery on behalf of clients. Nix later denied the company used such tactics, but was replaced as CEO before SCL went out of business last May.
  • Exterior of Cambride Analytica building. On both sides of the building there are double decker busses and people walking...
    Brais G. Rouco/Getty Images
    02
    After the news about Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data made headlines in March, the British Information Commissioner’s Office searched the company’s London-based office and seized its servers as part of an ongoing investigation into the use of data in politics.
  • Portrait of Christopher Wylie.
    Marlene Awaad/Bloomberg/Getty Images
    03
    Former SCL contractor Christopher Wylie blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica last March, telling \*The Guardian\* and \*The New York Times\* that the company misappropriated the data of tens of millions of Facebook users and used it for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election in the US.
  • Trump speaking on a stage with Vice President Pence Melanie and his son Barron. In the background is a row of USA flags.
    Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
    04
    During the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica staffers and data scientists worked side by side with President Trump’s staff in the campaign’s digital headquarters in San Antonio, Texas.
  • Ted Cruz leaning in to shake hands with crowd of people from a stage.
    Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg/Getty Images
    05
    Before working on the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica consulted for senator Ted Cruz’s campaign. The company would later claim credit for helping Cruz win the Iowa primary.
  • Portrait of Aleksandr Kogan speaking.
    Win McNamee/Getty Images
    06
    As a professor at the University of Cambridge, Aleksandr Kogan built a personality profiling quiz that scraped its users’ Facebook data, as well as the data of millions of their friends. Kogan sold those people’s data, and his predictions about their personalities to SCL, which used it to build psychological profiles of every adult in the United States. SCL’s American spinoff, Cambridge Analytica, then pitched its so-called “psychographic” ad targeting methods to political operatives in the US.
  • Mark Zuckerberg standing in front of a table engulfed by large crowd of photographers taking photos of him.
    Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
    07
    The Cambridge Analytica scandal hit Facebook hardest, revealing just how much data the company gave away to app developers before 2015. In April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to Congress to answer for the company’s actions.
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