Facebook’s claims to be outraged over the Cambridge Analytica scandal were simply hollow words in “PR crisis mode”, the academic at the centre of the dispute has told parliament.
Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University researcher whose Facebook app extracted the data of millions of users from the platform, said he thought it was reasonable for the social network to continue to employ his former business partner and co-founder, Joseph Chancellor, because they do not “actually think” that his previous work was problematic.
“I think they realise that their platform has been mined left and right by thousands of others and I was just the unlucky person that ended up somehow linked to the Trump campaign, and we are where we are,” Kogan told Damian Collins, the chair of the culture, media and sports select committee, in a parliamentary hearing.
“I think they realise all this, but PR is PR and they’re trying to manage the crisis, and it’s convenient to point the finger at a single entity and try to paint the picture this is a rogue agent.”
Kogan and Chancellor set up GSR in 2014, and took data from the social network for use by Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Elections. Chancellor left in 2015 to join Facebook, shortly before Kogan’s relationship with SCL ended and GSR was wound up.
Collins asked Kogan about Facebook’s response to the scandal, querying why Kogan had been attacked by the company even though his former partner continued to be employed by it.
“When Facebook’s response from their deputy general counsel describing your work as ‘a scam and a fraud’, data harvesting, and they singled you out to say that ‘you’d lied to us and violated our platform policies’, those remarks must apply to Joseph Chancellor as well,” Collins asked.
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