Revealed:Trump’s election consultants filmed saying they use bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians
https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to-entrap-politicians-investigationIn a series of five meetings and phone calls beginning in December 2017, a Channel 4 reporter posed as a fixer for a client they said was working to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka. They met with Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix; Mark Turnbull, managing director of CA Political Global; and Alex Tayler, chief data officer for Cambridge. They probed them on all manner of underhanded tactics, from deliberately spreading fake news to making up false identities. According to the video, the Cambridge executives took the bait.
In one January, 2018 meeting shown in Channel 4's video, Nix [outlines a plan to send in his operatives]:
"They will offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded on cameras, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the internet"
The Channel 4 video also shows Nix suggesting that they could send,
"some girls around to the candidate’s house. I’m just saying, we could bring some Ukrainians in on holiday with us you know, you know what I’m saying. [Ukrainian girls] “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.”
the video shows Nix saying.
The Channel 4 video also shows Nix expressing a willingness to help the "client" disseminate lies.
“These are things that, I mean, it sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed"
In a separate November 2017 meeting filmed by Channel 4, Turnbull [says],
“… we just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda’, because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda’, the next question is, ‘who’s put that out?’.”
"Our job is... to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion, it’s all about emotion.”
The company is at the centre of a scandal over its role in the harvesting of more than 50 million Facebook profiles. [Facebook lost $37 billion today as a result.]
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Part Three, on the company’s work in the United States, will be broadcast at 7pm tomorrow (Tuesday, 20 March 2018). You can watch Part One here.
