Quotes from Christopher Wylie

Different kinds of people have different motivations for filling out surveys. Sometimes you would have a group of people who just would fill it out because they're bored, and they don't have anything to do. Or they would just genuinely want to know what is their personality.

Cambridge Analytica will try to pick at whatever mental weakness or vulnerability that we think you have and try to warp your perception of what's real around you.

You are being intentionally monitored so that your unique biases, your anxieties, your weaknesses, your needs, your desires can be quantified in such a way that a company can seek to exploit that for profit.

Data is powerful and if it's put in the wrong hands, it becomes a weapon. And we have to understand that companies like Facebook, and platforms like Facebook or Twitter, are not just social networking sites. They're opportunities for information warfare.

If you are looking to create an information weapon, the battle space you operate in is social media. That is where the fight happens.

What makes clothing so potent is that people incorporate the fashion that they're wearing into their identity. It becomes part of you and how you show yourself to the world.

Cambridge Analytica's tactics contributed to a world where people kind of hate each other, and don't want to talk to each other, don't want to hear each other, don't want to speak to each other.

It weighs on me that I played a pivotal role in setting up a company that I think has done a lot of harm to the democratic process in a lot of countries.

Although the most amount of attention went to what happened in the United States and in Brexit, Cambridge Analytica and its predecessor, SCL Group, worked in countries around the world, particularly in the developing world, to manipulate elections for their clients. So it was global.

Rebekah Mercer just wanted stuff to happen. She is a difficult and demanding woman to work for.

Amazon can afford to lose money for years on its fashion offerings. But when, if you're a designer or a retailer, fashion is your bread and butter then you can't.

The power of data is being able to be much more efficient with who you target and who you talk to and what you talk to them about. If you can gain that sort of very surgical efficiency, particularly in elections where you just need one more vote in order to win an election, yeah, absolutely, it can play a very significant role.

I got recruited to join a research team at SCL group which, at the time, was a British military contractor based in London. Most of its clients were various ministries of defense in NATO countries. And what we were looking at is how to use data online to identify people who would be likely targets of different extremist groups.

The thing I think about all the time is, what if I'd taken a job at Deloitte instead? They offered me one. I just think if I'd taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldn't exist. You have no idea how much I brood on this.

If we want to prevent another Cambridge Analytica from happening... that starts with regulating big tech beyond just data protection issues, but also looking at whether or not we want as a society to tolerate manipulative design.

Before my coming out, as it were, I was very much a private person.

Different people choose different clothes and it correlates with their politics.

You have all kinds - you know, you have the rise of extremist groups in the United States. It's just you don't call them that, right? You've got, you know, some very cultish followings and belief systems.

For a long time I think journalists and society at large really did drink that Kool-Aid. They bought the message that the tech industry is good and they can do no wrong.

Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they're absent-minded professors and hippies. They're the early adopters... they're highly open to new ideas.

We need to change our mindset and understand that the protection of our democracy is a national security issue. When any country interferes with your democracy, they are attacking you.

If you've done something wrong, the first step is to try to own up and tell people about it.

Manipulating an election in a small developing country doesn't have the same sort of ripple effect of electing Donald Trump into the White House.

There are very tangible harms that come from manipulating people. In the United States, the public health response to Covid-19 has been inhibited by widespread disinformation about the existence of the virus or false claims about different kinds of treatment that do not work.