Cambridge Analytica, and their parent company SCL Group hit the headlines recently, when, after their work on the Trump campaign, reporting exposed misuse of Facebook data, linked them to ‘Brexit’, unethical conduct in international elections and revealed their relationship to defense propaganda contracts in the West.
Dr. Briant has spent over a decade researching SCL and Cambridge Analytica, she drew on substantial contacts she developed in her work on defense propaganda (see: Propaganda and Counter-terrorism: Strategies for Global Change Manchester University Press, 2015) to research an upcoming book What’s Wrong with the Democrats? Media Bias, Inequality and the rise of Donald Trump (co-authored with George Washington University professor Robert M. Entman) and academic publications on the EU referendum.
In this talk she will discuss her analysis of the company’s activities in each of these areas, how she gained such unique access to key executives who worked in an elite and secretive field, as well as the important implications of the key evidence she recently submitted to several public inquiries in the UK.