Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

The world did not know it yet, but Brexit was a crime scene. Britain was the first victim of an operation Bannon had set in motion years before. The so-called “patriots” of the Brexit movement, with their loud calls to rescue British law and sovereignty from the grips of the faceless European Union, decided to win a vote by mocking those very laws. And to do so, they deployed a web of companies associated with Cambridge Analytica in foreign jurisdictions, away from the scrutiny of the agencies charged with protecting the integrity of our democracies. Foreshadowing what was to come in America, a clear pattern emerged during the Brexit debacle, where previously unknown foreign entities began exerting influence on domestic elections by deploying large data sets of unexplained origins. And with social media companies not performing any checks on the advertising campaigns spreading throughout their platforms, there was no one standing guard to stop hostile entities seeking to sow chaos and disrupt our democracies.