A political action committee started by President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, John Bolton, was one of the first groups to hire Cambridge Analytica and tasked the data firm with conducting “behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging” using data gathered from Facebook, according to a report.
The New York Times reported Friday that Bolton’s group, The John Bolton SuperPAC, hired Cambridge Analytica in August 2014, a time period that overlaps with when the firm was improperly harvesting data from millions of Facebook profiles. The company had started months before it was hired by Bolton’s group.
The super PAC spent close to $1.2 million on “survey research” from Cambridge Analytica, though the contract between the two entities described the work the data firm was doing as “behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging.”
According to documents and former Cambridge Analytica employees, the data firm used information that was taken from Facebook to conduct that microtargeting, the New York Times reported.
“The data and modeling Bolton’s PAC received was derived from the Facebook data,” Christophe Wylie, a data expert who worked for Cambridge Analytica, told the New York Times. “We definitely told them about how we were doing it. We talked about it in conference calls, in meetings.”
Wylie claimed Bolton’s super PAC was “obsessed with how America was becoming limp wristed and spineless and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues.”
“That really meant making people more militaristic in their worldview,” he continued. “That’s what they said they wanted anyway.”
For its work with The John Bolton SuperPAC, Cambridge Analytica used psychographic models to develop concepts for ads for candidates the PAC backed. Among those candidates were Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who ran for the Senate in 2014, Wylie and a second former Cambridge Analytica employee told the New York Times.
Cambridge Analytica combined psychographic profiles it was developing using the data from Facebook with voter databases and other information.
Those efforts were discussed during a July 2014 meeting with a contractor for Bolton’s super PAC and staff with SCL, which is linked to Cambridge Analytica, according to an agenda of the meeting obtained by the New York Times.
The agenda said the psychographic profiles would be used to “identify the personality traits of individuals” that lived in states the Bolton super PAC wanted to target.
The document also said SCL wanted to use voter contact lists Bolton’s group had to steer people “toward the FB app.”
Cambridge Analytica, which also worked for the Trump campaign, has come under scrutiny after it was revealed the company improperly harvested and misused personal data from 50 million Facebook profiles to influence voters during the 2016 election.
The information was gathered through a Facebook app developed by an academic researcher that collected data from Facebook profiles. Cambridge Analytica and the researcher were supposed to delete the information, but did not.
Revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of Facebook data has prompted a joint investigation from attorneys general in New York and Massachusetts. Members of Congress are also urging Facebook leaders to testify about the breach of personal data.
Cambridge Analytica’s board of directors suspended the company’s chief executive officer, Alexander Nix, after an undercover video showed him discussing ways to entrap politicians using bribes and women.
Trump announced Thursday that Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations under fprmer President George W. Bush, would replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser as of April 9.
