In Cadwaadr’s ‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower, Christopher Wylie is introduced and his story is explained from childhood to present day. 

Christopher Wylie, now 27 years old, was 24 when he came up with the idea that led to the creation of a company called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica is a data analytics firm that played a large role in Brexit and many other political controversies such as Facebook supporting both Ted Cruz’s and Donald Trump’s campaigns. Wylie worked closely with Steve Bannon who ultimately became Trump’s chief strategist. The plan originally at Cambridge Analytica was to harvest Facebook profiles of millions of people to create psychological and political profiles. Directed by Bannon, it was claimed Cambridge Analytica “broke Facebook.” Wylie, while partaking in this endeavor, assumed it was legal and thought others were also aware of their actions. Alexander Nix outwardly told reporters that no Facebook data was ever used and would hide the work of Cambridge Analytica.

What’s interesting about Christopher Wylie to me is that he hated school and immediately went into the field of politics from a very young age. He stated that “politics was like fashion.” Specifically, “politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture.” I found Wylie’s motivation in the field fascinating and this statement seemed to drive his endeavors. After working for Cambridge Analytica and discovering the abuse of data, Wylie decided to come forward and share all of the information he could.

The fact that 50 million profiles were “harvested” on a platform I use daily is extremely horrifying and makes me concerned about future privacy issues. I think this article is really important as well to show that a lot of posts and profiles contain propaganda and are specifically targeted to make people think a certain way.