Cambridge Analytica's Real Role in Trump's Dark Facebook Campaign

Now new data has opened a small window into Trump’s social-media machinery, and in particular the role played by the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica.

Kevin Poulsen

12.10.18 5:06 AM ET

Donald Trump’s Facebook campaign was crucial to his 2016 success, but two years later the nuts and bolts of the operation that helped sweep Trump into the White House remain hard to come by.

Now new data has opened a small window into Trump’s social media machinery, and in particular the role played by the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, a U.K. digital black ops firm that collapsed this year following revelations that it acquired and used detailed Facebook profile information on 87 million people without their knowledge.

In the wake of the privacy scandal, Trump and RNC officials have sought to distance the campaign from Cambridge Analytica. But questions persist. Last year Robert Mueller sought emails between Cambridge Analytica and Trump campaign staffers, and in March Mueller’s team questioned former campaign officials about the U.K. firm’s work for Trump.

A similar probing is playing out in the Senate Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation. As The Daily Beast reported Thursday, Senate investigators interrogated Steve Bannon about Cambridge Analytica behind closed doors last month.

Public statements and insider accounts have painted a muddled and contradictory picture on the key question of whether Trump’s Facebook campaign targeted voters using Cambridge’s vast store of dubiously acquired data, once described by the company as containing 400 data points on 230 million Americans.

Now a New York digital marketing consultant has unearthed a trove of digital artifacts from Trump’s social media campaign that provides the first hard evidence that Team Trump made continuous use of audience lists created by Cambridge Analytica to target a portion of its so-called “dark ads” on Facebook. The ads were deployed from July 2016 through the end of the election—and beyond, to the inauguration in January 2017.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/cambridge-analyticas-real-role-in-trumps-dark-facebook-campaign?ref=home