A biography for Christopher Wyliehasn’t been written yet.
“The work of Cambridge Analytica is not equivalent to traditional marketing. Cambridge Analytica specialized in disinformation, spreading rumors, kompromat, and propaganda.”
“I've worked in a lot of elections and it can feel like you're fighting a battle. You get into a mindset of 'we've got to win. If they're doing it, we're going to do it too.'”
“Elections are zero-sum games. That means that there's always one winner and a lot of losers. If you just get one more vote than the other person, you win that election.”
“In most Western democracies, you do have the freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not an entitlement to reach. You are free to say what you want, within the confines of hate speech, libel law and so on. But you are not entitled to have your voice artificially amplified by technology.”
“The things that I was building on originally for the defense of our democracies had been completely inverted to really, in my view, attack our democracies.”
“I got a call from the Lib Dems. They wanted to upgrade their databases and voter targeting. So, I combined working for them with studying for my degree.”
“Although the most amount of attention went to what happened in the United States and in Brexit, Cambridge Analytica and its predecessor, SCL Group, worked in countries around the world, particularly in the developing world, to manipulate elections for their clients. So it was global.”
“One of the reasons why I'm speaking out is because I think that it's really concerning that no one has really investigated Cambridge Analytica and its role in the 2016 election.”
“I got recruited to join a research team at SCL group which, at the time, was a British military contractor based in London. Most of its clients were various ministries of defense in NATO countries. And what we were looking at is how to use data online to identify people who would be likely targets of different extremist groups.”
“Rebekah Mercer just wanted stuff to happen. She is a difficult and demanding woman to work for.”
“Vote Leave broke the law. I can say that out loud now. Vote Leave broke the law. But nothing happened.”
“Manipulating an election in a small developing country doesn't have the same sort of ripple effect of electing Donald Trump into the White House.”
“Disinformation has always existed. It's not like all of a sudden we've just discovered this new thing called propaganda.”
“The United States is walking in the same direction as China, we're just allowing private companies to monetize left, right and center. Just because it's not the state doesn't mean that there isn't harmful impacts that could come if you have one or two large companies monitoring or tracking everything you do.”
“When you look at history, every major movement, the first thing they do is create an aesthetic. Think about the Nazis. Or the Maoists in China. Any kind of revolution has an aesthetic, and that's because one of the fundamental human universals that everybody in every culture throughout time has done is wear clothes.”
“There are very tangible harms that come from manipulating people. In the United States, the public health response to Covid-19 has been inhibited by widespread disinformation about the existence of the virus or false claims about different kinds of treatment that do not work.”
“Trends are just as important in politics as they are in fashion; just that rather than an aesthetic trend, it might be an ideological, behavioral or cultural trend - you need to keep track of all kinds of trends in politics because you need to know if you come out and say something, what the adoption of that will be six months down the road.”
“The thing I think about all the time is, what if I'd taken a job at Deloitte instead? They offered me one. I just think if I'd taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldn't exist. You have no idea how much I brood on this.”
“I'm sorry Alex Jones, but the content that InfoWars has been putting out is just flat out lies. You are entitled to say whatever it is that you want, that is fine; you are not entitled to a megaphone if that information is false.”
“We have a completely unregulated digital landscape. There is almost no oversight. We are placing blind trust in companies like Facebook to do the honorable and decent thing.”