In Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin asked the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to investigate the DUP's use of Cambridge Analytica-linked firm AggregrateIQ in last year's assembly election and its Brexit campaign for the EU referendum.
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The company received more than £4.6m from Brexit campaign groups – more than any other company in the 2016 referendum.
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AggregrateIQ is thought to have 'micro-targeted' voters with political advertising on social media using their personal data.
It has been linked to a similar firm, Cambridge Analytica. The DUP has declined to explain what it paid AggregateIQ to do, but insisted its campaigns "meet all legal and regulatory conditions".
https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/technology/2018/03/22/news/mark-zuckerberg-apologises-over-cambridge-analytica-scandal-1285246/It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750. “Coordination” between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t. Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”.
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Who’s Chris Wylie?
“He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends. He’s the one who brought them in.”
There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercer’s distributed empire. “The Canadians were our back office. They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved. You need to find Chris Wylie.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy
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