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Cambridge Analytica-linked academic spurns idea Facebook swayed election | Technology | The Guardian

Cambridge Analytica-linked academic spurns idea Facebook swayed election | Technology | The Guardian: The academic researcher who harvested personal data from Facebook for a political consultancy firm said on Tuesday that the idea the data was useful in swaying voters’ decisions was “science fiction”.

“People may feel angry and violated if they think their data was used in some kind of mind-control project,” Aleksandr Kogan, the now notorious Cambridge University psychologist whose app collected data on up to 87 million Facebook users, said during a US Senate hearing. “This is science fiction. The data is entirely ineffective.”


Cambridge Analytica's 'victimised' ex-chief lambasts liberal media
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Kogan’s appearance before the Senate comes three months after the revelation that he had transferred his giant dataset to Cambridge Analytica, a now defunct political consultancy that worked on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The scandal set off political shockwaves in the US and UK.

The academic was portrayed as a liar and a fraud by Facebook when news of the data harvest broke in March. Kogan has argued in the press and before parliament that he was being scapegoated for behavior that was normal and that Facebook did nothing to prevent.

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