A second whistleblower has come forward to expose the inner workings of how Cambridge Analytica targeted Trump voters
- A second former employee from Cambridge Analytica has come forward to speak to the media about how the firm operated while it was working for Donald Trump's campaign during the 2016 presidential race.
- Brittany Kaiser detailed a 27-page internal presentation in which the firm describes how it targeted Trump voters on social media.
- Cambridge Analytica is embroiled in an international controversy over its alleged improper use of millions of people's Facebook data.
Another former employee of Cambridge Analytica has come forward and revealed the techniques the controversial data firm used to target US voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
A 27-page internal presentation obtained by The Guardian shows how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and Snapchat to push pro-Donald Trump advertisements during the campaign.
While the advertising techniques described in the internal presentation were perfectly legal, they provide further insight into the extent to which Cambridge tried to influence people's perceptions of political candidates on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election.
The Trump campaign hired the firm to lead its digital advertising efforts in early June 2016. Upon joining the Trump team, Cambridge staff discovered it had virtually no centralized digital marketing team.
"There was no database of record. There were many disparate data sources that were not connected, matched or hygiened," Brittany Kaiser, who left her job as a business development director at Cambridge two weeks ago, told The Guardian. "There was no data science program, so they weren't undertaking any modelling."
But Cambridge helped the Trump campaign turn things around with in-depth survey research, data modelling, and targeted algorithms on social media.
In one example detailed in the leaked 27-page presentation, Cambridge bought ad space on Google so that when people searched the words "Trump Iraq War," the first query would show a pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton message.
"Hillary Voted for the Iraq War - Donald Trump opposed it," one of the ads read.
"Hillary Clinton supports NAFTA - She will ship jobs overseas," said another.
Kaiser left Cambridge Analytica earlier this month over a contract dispute, according to The Guardian. She is the second former employee from the company - following 28-year-old Christopher Wylie - to speak to the media about how the firm operated.
Cambridge has been under intense scrutiny in the last week after it was reported that the firm used the personal information of 50 million people on Facebook without authorization to target them with personalized political advertisements.
Facebook has since suspended the firm from buying ads or managing pages on its social media platform. The company's CEO, Alexander Nix, has also been suspended amid an investigation by British lawmakers into fake news and Nix's contradictory statements regarding Cambridge's use of data from Facebook.