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Cambridge Analytica scandal makes waves in Bucharest
According to AP correspondent, the chairman of Romania's ruling party says his Social Democratic Party did not hire Cambridge Analytica for its successful 2016 electoral campaign. And Cambridge Analytica itself reportedly said it did not work on the campaign, despite being interested.
Liviu Dragnea told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he "categorically" did not hire Cambridge Analytica or its parent company SCL Group, a British strategic communications company.
His comment came after a British consultant, Rupert Wolfe Murray, who was based in Romania at the time, said he was contacted by Mark Turnbull, a senior official at Cambridge Analytica, in August 2016.
The British public relations consultant, Rupert Wolfe-Murray, has revealed that in the summer of 2016 he was approached by Cambridge Analytica – the company at the centre of the Facebook data harvesting scandal – to “work with them” on the 2016 Romanian parliamentary election on behalf of the PSD. The party would go on to comfortably win the election.
“I recognised the name of one of Cambridge Analytica’s bosses, Mark Turnbull,” Mr Wolfe-Murray told Emerging Europe. “I checked my old emails and sure enough, on August 6, 2016 – four months before the Romanian parliamentary election – there were some emails from him. I was based in Romania at the time, as a consultant.”
In one of the emails, Mr Turnbull explains what the job would entail:
“What we have offered is to embed a two-person team into the current campaign team – a political strategist and a communications specialist, but effectively with similar skill sets/roles – to provide ongoing strategic advice and assistance across the campaign (branding, copywriting, PR, media relations, digital outreach etc.) over the next two-three months.”
Mr Wolfe-Murray turned down the offer: working for a Romanian political party contradicts his moral code. “It was probably just a pitch, and I would have been part of an offer,” Mr Wolfe-Murray explained, before adding that “to work in countries like Romania you need a personal ethical code or you will get sucked into these corrupt opportunities.”
The Social Democrats won about 46 percent of the vote and the Liberals came second with 20 percent.
Separately, investigative platform RISE project reported SCL Group set up an office in Romania in 2011, though it is not clear who they worked for.
The PSD has denied working with Cambridge Analytica, and Mr Turnbull himself claimed on March 21 that he had not done any work for any Romanian political parties. He had previously told an undercover reporter from Channel 4 News in the UK that: “We’ve just used a different organisation to run a very, very successful project in an Eastern European country where… no-one even knew they were there.”
Facebook is facing investigations on multiple fronts after revelations that data on 50 million users were improperly harvested by Cambridge Analytica and used by Donald Trump’s campaign in the 2017 US presidential election. Cambridge Analytica has said that it deleted the data when it realised it had been collected in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has finally apologized for weaknesses in the social network's policies that enabled an app to gain access to the personal information of 50 million users without their consent.
Zuckerberg told CNN late Wednesday that he is "really sorry," speaking in his first interview since news of the scandal broke last week.
His mea culpa on cable television came a few hours after he acknowledged on his Facebook page that his company had made mistakes, but without saying he was sorry.
During the CNN interview, Zuckerberg also expressed regrets for not doing more after Facebook first discovered that Cambridge Analytica had gained access to a broad swath of Facebook users' data in 2015.
Until his post and the CNN interview, Zuckerberg had remained silent about the privacy scandal, as had Facebook's No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg.
He is admitting mistakes and outlining steps to protect user data in light of privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm.
Zuckerberg is breaking more than four days of silence as he posts an update about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page Wednesday that Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data, and "if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you."
Zuckerberg and Facebook's No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, have been quiet since news broke Friday that Cambridge may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections.