Facebook bans Trump campaign’s data analytics firm for taking user information
The company, which began working for the then presidential hopeful in June 2016, promised its ‘psychographic’ profiles could predict the personality and political leanings of every adult in the United States
Facebook is suspending the Trump-affiliated data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, after learning that it failed to delete data that it had taken inappropriately from users of the social network, Facebook said late Friday.
Facebook said it was suspending the accounts of Strategic Communication Laboratories, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, as well as the accounts of a University of Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies.
Cambridge Analytica, a firm specialising in using online data to create voter personality profiles to target them with political messages, ran data operations for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The company was funded by Trump supporter and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and former Trump senior adviser Stephen Bannon once sat on its board. The company, which began working for the Trump campaign in June 2016, promised that its so-called “psychographic” profiles could predict the personality and political leanings of every adult in the United States.
The analytics firm was asked in December to turn over internal documents to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as part of the investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.