Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistle blower has been giving evidence to the DCMS Select Committee (HERE) and it seems quite shocking to me (and I am old enough to be well beyond being shocked normally). It looks quite obvious that Vote Leave broke the law by coordinating their campaign with BeLeave, the DUP and Veterans for Leave.
Some very murky stuff went on in the Leave campaign, in terms of psychological profiling and digital marketing through Facebook and other social media. SCL, Cambridge Analytica and Aggregate IQ were essentially the same company although they may have been legally separate. I don't think anyone on the outside really knows what they did but there is now a campaign (on behalf of Brexiteers) to rubbish Christopher Wylie and Sanni Shahmir and to suggest that these things don't matter and didn't affect the result.
Johnson has tweeted saying Leave won fair and square. Dominic Cummings denies Vote Leave had any links with Cambridge Analytica (HERE) but we know from Christopher Wylie that there were numerous links between AIQ and CA. Now, on Cummings' own blog (HERE) he himself is trying to play down the impact of the digital marketing but we shouldn't forget he is on record (HERE) as saying “Without a doubt, the Vote Leave campaign owes a great deal of its success to the work of AggregateIQ. We couldn’t have done it without them”.
In the same Telegraph article of February 2017 (HERE) Paul Stephenson, the communications director of Vote Leave, said: “Zack and AIQ were instrumental in helping the Leave campaign win. Together with our digital director, Henry De Zoete, they transformed Vote Leave's digital offering and helped us to contact voters over one billion times online".
Vote Leave spent 40% of their income (£2.7 million) with AIQ so it must have had some effect. Wylie himself says AIQ played a "very significant role" in the Leave campaign. Also, according to Wylie Vote Leave personnel were trying to delete names from a computer drive shared with BeLeave days after The Information Commissioner's Office announced an investigation. Why do that if it was all "fair and square"?
I am not sure we can say the ads were fake but if they spent 25% more with AIQ than planned (another £700K on top of £2.7 Million) one might infer it had a material impact on the vote. And Leave only won by 2%. It would not have taken much to do it.
There is also now a water muddying exercise to suggest Remain did the same and it's true that Remain spent more and they did give money to five separate remain supporting groups but the law says this is OK provided there were truly separate campaigns and no one has yet produced any evidence that they were not. But if they also broke the law that should also be investigated.
And finally, the remain side didn't spend money with a tiny Canadian company (AIQ) with close and strong links to Cambridge Analytica, a company owned by an American Billionaire and with what now looks like a history of dirty tricks and subverting democracy across the world.
