Andrew Nix, CEO of the infamous voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica, has been suspended from his role.
His suspension follows him being filmed by undercover journalists seeming to encourage sending “some girls around to the candidate’s house” to obtain compromising material as a way of influencing a campaign.
In another recording, Nix can be heard saying, “It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed.”
In a statement, the company said, “The board of Cambridge Analytica has announced today that it has suspended CEO Alexander Nix with immediate effect pending a full, independent investigation.
“In the view of the board, Mr Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation.”
Alex Tayler, the chief data officer for the company, was recorded separately stating that they were responsible for Trump’s Electoral College win.
“When you think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes, but won the Electoral College, that’s down to the data and the research,” Tayler said. “That’s how he won the election.”
Cambridge Analytica served as the data operations team for Trump’s election campaign back in 2016, and have come under fire after reports in The New York Times and The Guardian stated that the company had misused a researcher’s data to harvest more than 50 million user profiles from Facebook.
The Guardian’s report yesterday was quite alarming, stating:
When the reporter asked if Cambridge Analytica could offer investigations into the damaging secrets of rivals, Nix said it worked with former spies from Britain and Israel to look for political dirt. He also volunteered that his team were ready to go further than an investigation.
“Oh, we do a lot more than that,” he said over dinner at an exclusive hotel in London. “Deep digging is interesting, but you know equally effective can be just to go and speak to the incumbents and to offer them a deal that’s too good to be true and make sure that that’s video recorded.
“You know these sorts of tactics are very effective, instantly having video evidence of corruption.”
Nix suggested one possible scenario, in which the managing director of Cambridge Analytica’s political division, Mark Turnbull, would pose as a wealthy developer looking to exchange finance for land. “I’m a master of disguise,” Turbull said.
Another option, Nix suggested, would be to create a sex scandal. “Send some girls around to the candidate’s house, we have lots of history of things,” he told the reporter. “We could bring some Ukrainians in on holiday with us, you know what I’m saying.”
