Christopher Wylie, born in 1989, is the whistleblower that confessed to the Guardian how Cambridge Analytica harvested, analysed data and used them to influence people political ideas. Christopher Wylie is a very young and smart informatic scientist. The Guardian described him as «funny, deep, curious, “asshole” and fascinating». Pink, blue, yellow haired, Wylie is an eccentric boy, a complete genius. He started his career in the fashion world, where he developed techniques able to unerstand and influence people fashion preferences. Then he landed in Cambridge Analytica and uses his skills to target political profiles. Then in 2018 he decided to confess the mechanisms behind Cambridge Analytica, violating the non-disclosure agreement made with Bannon and Mercer.

Alexander Nix, born in 1977, is a financial analyst; initially, he worked for Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), a Company working in behavioural and communication research (this company became very close to Cambridge Analytica business). He collaborated for over 40 political campaigns in US, in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He convinced Mercer and Bannon to create Cambridge Analytica, becoming the CEO, and he used it to help the most important political campaigns of the last years, Brexit and US Presidential.

Assistant Professor at Stanford University (Graduate School of Business) studying the psychological differences between people, he hold a doctorate in Psychology from the University of Cambridge and master’s degrees in Psychometrics and in Social Psychology. Kosinski was Deputy Director of the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, a researcher at Microsoft Research, and a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford’s Computer Science Department.

We are talking about Kosinski because he, with another Cambridge University researcher (David Stillwell), built an app for Facebook called myPersonality. The purpose of this app was to studying and quantifying people personality with Psychometric techniques. Making some questions to users, looking at their likes to Facebook pages, shared posts or captions they were able to create psychological profiles of people. Indeed, now, Kosinksi is one of the most important expert of behavioural microtargeting, a marketing system creating custom advs for every single user. Michal Kosinski, although he’s not direclty involved in the scandal we are telling you, is important because all his psychological studies and the algorithm he developed were used by Cambridge Analytica.

Robert Mercer, born in 1946, is an American computer scientist. He is also a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president.

In 2015, The Washington Post called Mercer one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics. Since 2006, Mercer has donated about $34.9 million to Republican political campaigns in the US.

Moreover, Mercer played a key role in the Brexit vote. He was an activist in the campaign to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Mercer donated the services of data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to Nigel Farage, the head of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The firm was able to advise Leave.EU through its ability to harvest data from people’s Facebook profiles in order to target them with individualized persuasive messages to vote for Brexit.

Born in 1953, Steve Bannon, during his working life, did several jobs. He started as an officer in the United States navy, later he became vice president in Goldman Sachs (a global investment banking) ; he’s been acting director of a research project, Biosphere 2; he worked in Hollywood too, as executive producer and in 2016 he, finally, landed in Trump presidential campaign, as chief executive officer.

Following Trump’s election to the presidency, Bannon was appointed chief strategist and senior counselor to the President-elect.

After a while, Steve Bannon left his role in US Presidency, because he was accused by many democratic Representatives of been racist and against civil rights. But also because, in 2018, the Senate Intelligence Committee started conducting a “wide-ranging” investigation of Bannon’s activities during the campaign, including knowledge he may have had about any contacts between Russia and two campaign advisors, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, as well as his role with Cambridge.

Famous all over the universe for his creation, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is now one of the richest and genial men in the world!

Born in 1984, in United States, he attended Harvard University; there, with some roommates, he launched Facebook. Initially this program was supposed to be a social network working only inside Harvard University or in the Ivy League Colleges net. Later the website went beyond university and reached public users. In 2012, Facebook was used by one billion people.

Now Zuckerberg is the 5th richest person in the world and, according to Forbes, he’s the 10th in the list of The World’s Most Powerful People.