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

by Christopher Wylie

America is now living in the aftermath of the first scaled deployment of a psychological weapon of mass destruction.

This material demonstrated that the company had recruited hackers, hired personnel with known links to Russian intelligence, and engaged in bribery, extortion, and disinformation campaigns in elections around the world. There were confidential legal memos from lawyers warning Steve Bannon about Cambridge Analytica’s violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as well as a cache of documents describing how the firm exploited Facebook to access more than eighty-seven million private accounts and used that data in efforts to suppress the votes of African Americans.

It contained hundreds of pages of emails, financial documents, and transcripts of audio recordings and text messages that I had covertly procured in London earlier that year. These files had been sought by U.S. intelligence

and detailed the close relationships between the Russian embassy in London and both Trump associates and leading Brexit campaigners. This file showed that leading British alt-right figures met with the Russian embassy before and after they flew to meet the Trump campaign, and that at least three of them were receiving offers of preferential investment opportunities in Russian mining companies potentially worth millions. What became clear in these communications was how early the Russian government had identified the Anglo-American alt-right network, and that it may have groomed figures within it to become access agents to Donald Trump. It showed the connections among the major events of 2016: the rise of the alt-right, the surprise passage of Brexit, and the election of Trump.

Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy.

Because the crimes happened online, rather than in any physical location, the police could not agree on who had jurisdiction.

After Obama’s 2008 victory, parties all over the world were becoming interested in this new “American-style campaign,” powered by national targeting databases and big digital operations. Behind the campaign was the emerging practice of microtargeting, where machine-learning algorithms ingest large amounts of voter data to divide the electorate into narrow segments and predict which individual voters are the best targets to persuade or turn out in an election.

Most campaigns can be boiled down to two core operations: persuasion and turnout. The turnout, or “GOTV” (get out the vote), universe is those people who likely support the candidate but do not always vote. The persuasion universe is the inverse, representing those who likely will vote but do not always support the party. People who are either very unlikely to vote or very unlikely to ever support us are put into an exclusion universe, as there is no point in engaging them.

Finding the right set of voters to contact is the name of the game.

What microtargeting did was find extra data sets, such as commercial data about a voter’s mortgage, subscriptions, or car model, to provide more context to each voter.

Clickard suggested I look more deeply into personality as a factor in voting behavior. Specifically, he pointed me to the five-factor model of personality, which represents personality as a set of ratings on five scales: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. With time and testing, the measurement of these five traits has proven to be a powerful predictor of many aspects of people’s lives. A person scoring high in conscientiousness, for example, is more likely to do well in school. A person scoring higher in neuroticism is more likely to develop depression. Artists and creative people tend to score high in openness. Those who are less open and more conscientious tend to be Republicans. This sounds simple, but the Big Five model can be an immensely useful tool in predicting voters’ behavior.

I finally realized something. Maybe the Lib Dems didn’t have a geographic or demographic base; maybe they were a product of a psychological base. I put together a pilot study and found that Lib Dems tended to score higher on “openness” and lower on “agreeableness” than Labour or Tory voters. I realized that these Lib Dems tended to be, like me, open, curious, eccentric, stubborn, and a bit bitchy at times.

The five-factor model was the key that cracked the Lib Dems code—and, in the end, provided the central idea behind what became Cambridge Analytica.

Fashion? As in clothes? You really want to study clothes? But to me, fashion and politics are both, at their core, about cycles of culture and identity. To my mind, they’re essentially two manifestations of the same phenomenon—a conviction that would become central to what we created at Cambridge Analytica.

a form of dress that can be glam and sumptuous while mocking and upending conventional notions of beauty, bodies, and gender. Drag inverted my thinking. It showed me how to not just defy these social norms, but to laugh at them and simply be who you want to be on your own terms.

Their style was self-indulgent and naïvely romantic, and it bordered on kitsch. Even terrorists have pop culture.

perspecticide—the active deconstruction and manipulation of popular perception—you

People high on the narcissism scale are susceptible because they are more prone to feelings of envy and entitlement, which are strong motivators of rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying behavior. This means these targets will be more likely to develop an exaggerated suspicion of harassment, persecution, victimhood, or unfair treatment. This is the “low-hanging fruit” for initiating the subversion of a larger organization. Later, this learning would serve as one of the foundations for Cambridge Analytica’s work catalyzing an alt-right insurgency in America.

In psychological warfare, the weak points are flaws in how people think. If you’re trying to hack a person’s mind, you need to identify cognitive biases and then exploit them.

We are all affected with cognitive biases, which are the commonly occurring errors in our thinking that generate flawed subjective interpretations of information. It is completely normal for people to process information with bias—in fact, everyone does—and oftentimes these biases are harmless in day-to-day life. These biases are not random in each person. Rather, they are systematic errors, meaning they create patterns in common forms of irrational thinking. In fact, thousands of cognitive biases have been identified in the field of psychology. Some biases are so common and seemingly intuitive that it can be hard for people to even recognize that they are actually irrational.

For them, it framed Cuccinelli as “the devil you know” and positioned his salient “quirkiness” as at least a reliable quirkiness. It turns out that Republicans can accept a batshit insane candidate, so long as it’s consistent insanity. This finding later informed almost everything that Cambridge Analytica worked on.

Chaos and disruption, I later learned, are central tenets of Bannon’s animating ideology. Before catalyzing America’s dharmic rebalancing, his movement would first need to instill chaos throughout society so that a new order could emerge. He was an avid reader of a computer scientist and armchair philosopher who goes by the name Mencius Moldbug, a hero of the alt-right who writes long-winded essays attacking democracy and virtually everything about how modern societies are ordered. Moldbug’s views on “truth” influenced Bannon and what Cambridge Analytica would become. Moldbug has written that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth,” and Bannon embraced this. “Anyone can believe in the truth,” Moldbug writes. “It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”

For him, politics was not about ideas or policy—that was all bullshit for the true believers like Rebekah Mercer. For him, politics was guerrilla warfare, where he could play Che.

Although Cambridge Analytica was created as a business, I learned later that it was never intended to make money. The firm’s sole purpose was to cannibalize the Republican Party and remold American culture.

Mercer looked at winning elections as a social engineering problem.

The psychology department at Cambridge had spearheaded several breakthroughs in using social-media data for psychological profiling, which in turn prompted interest from government research agencies. What Cambridge Analytica eventually became depended in large part on the academic research published at the university it was named after.

Cambridge Analytica was a company that took large amounts of data and used it to design and deliver targeted content capable of moving public opinion at scale. None of this is possible, though, without access to the psychological profiles of the target population—and this, it turned out, was surprisingly easy to acquire through Facebook, with Facebook’s loosely supervised permissioning procedures.

The evidence was clear: The patterns of a social media user’s likes, status updates, groups, follows, and clicks all serve as discrete clues that could accurately reveal a person’s personality profile when compiled together. Facebook was frequently a supporter of this psychological research into its users and provided academic researchers with privileged access to its users’ private data. In

while DARPA was interested in psychological profiling for military information operations, Facebook was interested in using it for increased sales of online advertising.

“Facebook knows more about you than any other person in your life, even your wife,” Kogan told us. Nix snapped out of his trance, reverting to his usual embarrassing self. “Sometimes it’s best wives don’t know certain details,” he quipped, sipping his wine. “Why would I ever need or want a computer to remind me—or her?”

In management, they always say there is a golden rule for running any project: You can get a project done cheap, fast, or well. But the catch is you can choose only two, because you’ll never get all three. For the first time in my life, I saw that rule totally broken—because the Facebook app Kogan created was faster, better, and cheaper than anything I could have imagined.

I told myself that truly learning about society includes delving into uncomfortable questions about our darker sides. How could we understand racial bias, authoritarianism, or misogyny if we did not explore them? What I did not appreciate is the fine line between exploring something and actually creating it.

I told Bannon that the most striking thing CA had noticed was how many Americans felt closeted—and

Straight white men, particularly ones who were older, had grown up with a value set that granted them certain social privileges. Straight white men did not have to moderate their speech around women or people of color, because casual racism and misogyny were normalized behaviors. As social norms in America evolved, these privileges began to erode and many of these men were experiencing challenges to their behavior for the first time.

threatening to their identity as “regular men.”

Men who were not used to moderating their impulses, body language, and speech began to resent what they saw as the unfair mental and emotional labor it took to change and constantly correct how they presented in public.

These men began to experience the burden of the closet, and they did not like the feeling of having to change who they felt they were in order to “pass” in society. Although there were very different reasons for the closeting of gays and the closeting of racists and misogynists, these straight white men nonetheless felt a subjective experience of oppression in their own minds.

“Think about it,” I said to Bannon. “The message at a Tea Party rally is the same as at a Gay Pride parade: Don’t tread on me! Let me be who I am!” Embittered conservatives felt like they couldn’t be “real men” anymore, because women wouldn’t date men who behaved the way men had behaved for millennia. They had to hide their true selves to please society—and they were pissed about it. In their minds, feminism had locked “real men” in the closet. It was humiliating, and Bannon knew that there was no force more powerful than a humiliated man. It was a state of mind he was eager to explore (and exploit).

From the data CA collected, the team was able to identify people who exhibited neuroticism and dark-triad traits, and those who were more prone to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than average citizens. Cambridge Analytica would target them, introducing narratives via Facebook groups, ads, or articles that the firm knew from internal testing were likely to inflame the very narrow segments of people with these traits. CA wanted to provoke people, to get them to engage.

By focusing so heavily on greater engagement, social media tends to parasitize our brain’s adaptive mechanisms. As it happens, the most engaging content on social media is often horrible or enraging. According to evolutionary psychologists, in order to survive in premodern times, humans developed a disproportionate attentiveness toward potential threats.

In gambling, a casino makes money from the number of turns a player takes. On social media, a platform makes money from the number of clicks a user performs. This is why there are infinite scrolls on newsfeeds—there is very little difference between a user endlessly swiping for more content and a gambler pulling the slot machine lever over and over.

The firm did this at the local level, creating right-wing pages with vague names like Smith County Patriots or I Love My Country. Because of the way Facebook’s recommendation algorithm worked, these pages would pop up in the feeds of people who had already liked similar content. When users joined CA’s fake groups, it would post videos and articles that would further provoke and inflame them. Conversations would rage on the group page, with people commiserating about how terrible or unfair something was. CA broke down social barriers, cultivating relationships across groups. And all the while it was testing and refining messages, to achieve maximum engagement. Now CA had users who (1) self-identified as part of an extreme group, (2) were a captive audience, and (3) could be manipulated with data.

Cambridge Analytica needed to infect only a narrow sliver of the population, and then it could watch the narrative spread.

Once a group reached a certain number of members, CA would set up a physical event. CA teams would choose small venues—a coffee shop or bar—to make the crowd feel larger.

People would show up and find a fellowship of anger and paranoia. This naturally led them to feel like they were part of a giant movement, and it allowed them to further feed off one another’s paranoia and fears of conspiracy. Sometimes a Cambridge Analytica staffer would act as a “confederate”—a tactic commonly used by militaries to stir up anxieties in target groups.

The meetings took place in counties all across the United States, starting with the early Republican primary states, and people would get more and more fired up at what they saw as “us vs. them.” What began as their digital fantasy, sitting alone in their bedrooms late at night clicking on links, was becoming their new reality. The narrative was right in front of them, talking to them, live in the flesh. Whether or not it was real no longer mattered; that it felt real was enough.

sometimes, if a person hears something enough times, they come to believe it. Once those initial individuals were sufficiently exposed to these new narratives, it would be time to have them meet one another so that they could form a group which could then organize. They would share rumors, working one another into deeper paranoia.

Once a county-based group begins self-organizing, you introduce them to a similar group in the next county over. Then you do it again. In time, you’ve created a statewide movement of neurotic, conspiratorial citizens. The alt-right.

CA estimated that if only 25 percent of the infrequent voters who began clicking on this new CA content eventually turned out to vote, they could increase statewide turnout for the Republicans in several key states by around 1 percent, which is often the margin of victory in tight races. Steve Bannon loved this. But he wanted CA to go further—and darker. He wanted to test the malleability of the American psyche. He urged us to include what were in effect racially biased questions in our research, to see just how far we could push people.

The firm started testing questions about black people—whether they were capable of succeeding in America without the help of whites, for example, or whether they were genetically predetermined to fail. Bannon believed that the civil rights movement had limited “free thinking” in America. He was determined to liberate people by revealing what he saw as the forbidden truths about race.