Facebook has provided evidence to Parliament and the ICO and Electoral Commission relevant to the recent stories about whistleblowers and the referendum.
It proves exactly what I have said about the Observer/C4 conspiracy theory that Vote Leave/I were secretly coordinating with Leave.EU/Cambridge Analytica and using the infamous Kogan/Cambridge Analytica data.
TIYDL refers to the infamous data collected by Kogan and given to Cambridge Analytica.
‘Use of TIYDL data – When an advertiser runs an ad campaign on Facebook one way they can target their ads is to use a list of email addresses (such as customers who signed up to their mailing list). AIQ used this method for many of their advertising campaigns during the Referendum. The data gathered through the TIYDL app did not include the email addresses of app installers or their friends. This means that AIQ could not have obtained these email addresses from the data TIYDL gathered from Facebook. AIQ must have obtained these email addresses for British voters targeted in these campaigns from a different source. We also conducted an analysis of the audiences targeted by AIQ in its Referendum-related ads, on the one hand, and UK user data potentially collected by TIYDL, on the other hand, and found very little overlap (fewer than 4% of people were common to both data sets, which is the same overlap we would find with random chance). This further suggests that the data from TIYDL was not used to build AIQ’s data sets in connection with the Referendum campaigns, although only AIQ has access to complete information about how it generated these data sets.’ [Emphasis added]
Note — this is not a statement about probabilities, it is certain: ‘AIQ could not have… AIQ must have…’ The emails used by AIQ for targeting ‘COULD NOT HAVE’ come from CA. This flatly contradicts Wylie.
Further, Facebook looked to see if there was evidence of targeting via a different route and found that the overlap with TIYDL data is ‘the same overlap we would find with random chance’. This flatly contradicts Wylie.
The central claims of the Observer, Channel 4, Michael Crick, Jon Snow, Wylie, Shahmir et al used to support their overall conspiracy theory are factually wrong. As I said weeks ago, Wylie’s claims about VL’s use of data were obviously technically laughable. Other libellous claims by the Observer/C4 concerning the ‘destruction of evidence’ on the VL google drive will similarly be shown to be factually wrong, showing neither who or what the Observer/C4 claimed.
Hopefully honest and professional media organisations will not repeat their conspiracy theories.
As I have said repeatedly, no reasonable person could think that the battle between Vote Leave/me and Leave.EU/Banks to control the official campaign really was a deep cover operation to hide our secret coordination over data.
There are serious issues concerning data, marketing and elections as I said before this conspiracy theory got going. It would be much better for the media to focus on these issues than persist Trump-like with claims that black = white.
Facebook evidence here
Dominic Cummings's Blog 