Updated | Government, PN deny being approached by Cambridge Analytica

The spokesperson for the government of Malta has denied having had any contact with the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, or any similar firm before 2017.

Kurt Farrugia said on Monday the Maltese government or the Labour Party never met any of their representatives, after an international exposé on the company’s role in using millions of Facebook profiles to influence voters in the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum.

“We have never met with any one of their representatives or with anyone claiming to be their representative,” Farrugia said, adding that the same applied for other similar companies. “We’ve never ever even made any contact.”

Farrugia said this was true of both the government and the Labour Party, both during the 2013 and 2017 elections.

He also denied knowing that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was in Malta at the same time that the country was gearing up for the 2017 election.

Farrugia also said that claims that a Facebook and mobile phone game the Labour Party launched in 2015, was used to collect user data, were “pure fiction”.

The app was a racing game that asked users to choose one of the colours red, blue, green – unmistakably the political colours of the Malta’s Labour, Nationalist and green parties – and required users to submit their name, email and ID number as well as being asked to choose between a tunnel or a bridge connecting Gozo to Malta.

“The app was developed for the government of Malta by an established local digital company,” Farrugia told MaltaToday.

“The data from the app was never used by government and certainly never transferred to any third parties. The government abided by and provided terms and conditions which protected data and privacy of participants.”

Claims that Labour had employed the services of Cambridge Analytica were made in 2017 by the late journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, but never substantiated.

The Nationalist Party’s (PN) head of communications told MaltaToday that there had never been any contact between the PN or any of its representatives and the company. He also denied being aware that Nix was in Malta last year.

Meanwhile, former leader Simon Busuttil told LovinMalta.com that the PN had never even approached by the big data firm.

“I double checked with my former head of office [Matthew Gatt] and secretary general [Rosette Thake] and both denied it,” Busutitl said. “I also double-checked my emails just in case and couldn’t find any reference to Cambridge Analytica at all. We had been approached by PR lobbying companies but never by data mining companies. I consider such direct targeting of voters through their psychological mind-sets to be in clear breach of their privacy and perhaps even of the law.

That social media and data analytics can be used by political parties to sway voters is not new, but the latest revelations about Cambridge Analytica appear to show the relative ease, and extent to which the democratic process can be influenced.

Documents leaked to the Observer newspaper by Christopher Wylie, a former employee and whistle-blower show how the company used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

“The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids,” Wylie told The Observer of the companies US operations.

Wylie was the one who came up with the idea that allowed Cambridge Analytica to turn Facebook likes into a political tool but was driven by guilt to come forward with information.

His former company is currently being investigated in both the US, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion, as well as the UK, over its role in the Brexit referendum.

The revelations prompted Facebook to suspend the company over improper use of the platform, an allegation the CA has denied. On Monday Facebook’s shares price by a whopping 6.8%, wiping $36.7 billion off the social media giant’s market value, and the largest drop in four years.

An undercover investigation by Channel 4 News showed that Cambridge Analytica’s operations go beyond Facebook data harvesting, with its employees – including Nix – filmed saying they could entrap their clients’ rival politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukranian prostitutes.

Cambridge Analytica has denied wrongdoing. “​Cambridge Analytica fully complies with Facebook’s terms of service and ​is currently ​in touch with Facebook ​following its ​recent statement​ that it had suspended the company from its platform, in order to resolve this matter as quickly as possible​,” the company said in a statement, adding that also its information had been obtained legally and fairly.

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