The inside story of our award-winning investigation into the political consulting firm and its use of Facebook profiles • Read our other top stories from 2018

Visiting the Observer’s newsroom on the Monday after we published our revelations about the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica this March was to step inside the blast zone of what felt something like the news equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

In the US, the story of how whistleblower Christopher Wylie had built media mogul Steve Bannon’s “psychological warfare tool” by harvesting millions of people’s Facebook profiles had erupted across every news channel. Questions rained in on Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and its boss, Mark Zuckerberg, including the most insistent – where was he?

Back in London we were still reeling from the impact: 72 hours of frantic scrambling, first to head off a serious last-minute legal threat from Facebook and then, at 1am, just hours before publication, another potential knockout blow: a full-frontal Facebook PR offensive against Cambridge Analytica – including kicking it off the platform – that threatened to blow our scoop. We had spent the early hours of Saturday morning in crisis calls and finally, with huge relief, published at midday, as planned.

That Monday morning an editor and I compared moments of gobsmackedness, and I said, as an aside: “They’re saying it could even affect Facebook’s share price.” He shook his head in disbelief.

Profile Cambridge Analytica: the key players Show Hide Alexander Nix, CEO An Old Etonian with a degree from Manchester University, Nix, 42, worked as a financial analyst in Mexico and the UK before joining SCL, a strategic communications firm, in 2003. From 2007 he took over the company’s elections division, and claims to have worked on 260 campaigns globally. He set up Cambridge Analytica to work in America, with investment from Robert Mercer. Aleksandr Kogan, data miner Aleksandr Kogan was born in Moldova and lived in Moscow until the age of seven, then moved with his family to the US, where he became a naturalised citizen. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and got his PhD at the University of Hong Kong before joining Cambridge as a lecturer in psychology and expert in social media psychometrics. He set up Global Science Research (GSR) to carry out CA’s data research. While at Cambridge he accepted a position at St Petersburg State University, and also took Russian government grants for research. He changed his name to Spectre when he married, but later reverted to Kogan. Steve Bannon, former board member A former investment banker turned “alt-right” media svengali, Steve Bannon was boss at website Breitbart when he met Christopher Wylie and Nix and advised Robert Mercer to invest in political data research by setting up CA. In August 2016 he became Donald Trump’s campaign CEO. Bannon encouraged the reality TV star to embrace the “populist, economic nationalist” agenda that would carry him into the White House. That earned Bannon the post of chief strategist to the president and for a while he was arguably the second most powerful man in America. By August 2017 his relationship with Trump had soured and he was out.

Robert Mercer, investor Robert Mercer, 71, is a computer scientist and hedge fund billionaire, who used his fortune to become one of the most influential men in US politics as a top Republican donor. An AI expert, he made a fortune with quantitative trading pioneers Renaissance Technologies, then built a $60m war chest to back conservative causes by using an offshore investment vehicle to avoid US tax.

Rebekah Mercer, investor Rebekah Mercer has a maths degree from Stanford, and worked as a trader, but her influence comes primarily from her father’s billions. The fortysomething, the second of Mercer’s three daughters, heads up the family foundation which channels money to rightwing groups. The conservative mega‑donors backed Breitbart, Bannon and, most influentially, poured millions into Trump’s presidential campaign.



A couple of hours later, I glanced at Twitter and saw a graph. It showed a wavering line heading off a cliff. Facebook’s share price had plunged $30bn in the first two hours of trading. By the end of the week it was more than $100bn. Today it’s $170bn down.

Money talks. In the end, that’s what it comes down to. And it’s why this story finally landed. Because the facts had been out there for more than two years, ever since Harry Fox Davies published the first report in the Guardian in December 2015. But Facebook had simply chosen to ignore them. And all it eventually took – to finally stop them ignoring it – was an entire year’s work, the resources of three news organisations across two continents – the Observer, the New York Times and Channel 4 News – Wylie and an undercover film, plus a sheaf of incriminating documents.

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If there’s one tiny ray of light in all this, it’s that journalism can have an impact – even the cash-strapped, shoestring British variety. And if there’s a reason to despair, it’s that it’s not enough. Since then Facebook’s year has lurched from disastrous to more disastrous by way of appalling. The journalistic exposés and damning reports keep on coming. This week alone has seen another heavyweight New York Times article, two congressional reports about Russian interference and a lawsuit by the Washington DC attorney general. But eight months on and fewer than 100 days until Brexit, we’re no nearer, in Britain, to finding out the truth about Facebook and its role in our referendum. About what took place in the darkened recesses of this blackest of black boxes. Zuckerberg, its founder and chief executive, has defied parliament. The company is quite simply beyond the rule of law.

Because what the Cambridge Analytica story exposed, by accident, from Facebook’s reaction in the months that followed, is the absolute power of the tech giants. Power and unaccountability that is the foundational platform on which populist authoritarians are rising to power all across the globe. Power and unaccountability that continues unchecked. In Britain, in a media landscape that is insular and self-regarding and obsessed with what happens at Westminster, we’ve failed to connect the dots between Facebook and Brexit and the world outside. To the global currents that favour autocrats and populists. And to the technology platforms assisting them.

Timeline Facebook user data timeline Show Hide The Observer reveals that Cambridge Analytica, an electoral consultancy that helped get Donald Trump elected, and briefly worked with the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum, had harvested profile information of more than 50 million Facebook users. The data, exfiltrated by a Cambridge University academic's company called Global Science Research, was used to build "psychometric" models of voters, to narrowly target adverts at them based on their personalities. Zuckerberg testifies to Congress over the scandal, telling US representatives "it was my mistake, and I'm sorry", after the social network launches its first tranche of policy changes in response to the news, banning third party data brokers from targeting users on its site. The DCMS committee's inquiry on Fake News raises concerns over the targeting of voters in the Brexit referendum, and hears evidence from Facebook's CTO, Mike Schroepfer – the most senior Facebook employee to speak to Parliament. Cambridge Analytica declares bankruptcy, as MPs begin trying to force Zuckerberg to speak to Parliament about the scandal. Facebook suspends 200 apps as part of its investigation into data misuse. Cambridge Analytica's ex-head, Alexander Nix, finally speaks to parliament, and blames the "global liberal media" for destroying his company. The ICO, the UK's data regulator begins an inquiry into whether online political advertising needs to be reformed. The ICO issues its interim report, slamming a number of political actors including Vote Leave, Leave.EU and the Labour Party for misusing personal data in political campaigning. Facebook is fined £500,000, the maximum possible, for failing to protect user data. A "grand committee", of MPs from nine countries, forms, led by the UK's DCMS committee. It demands to hear from Mark Zuckerberg, but Facebook only sends its European Policy chief Richard Allan. The committee obtains internal emails from Facebook, initially handed over to a developer suing it in California, that it says show the company planning to sell out users.

Because much of what is happening in Britain is not British. The technology that mediated our referendum, that continues to dominate our public discourse, that will underlie any and all future elections, is not British. It’s American. And we know now, thanks to Robert Mueller, the head of the US special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, that it was subverted deliberately by Moscow from 2014 onwards.

Our democracy is in thrall to these twin foreign powers – the US corporate surveillance giants and the Russian state that co-opted them. Holding Facebook to account is not about posturing, or even politics, it’s vital for our national security. Facebook knows this. The government knows this. The intelligence services know this. But, in Britain, the silence is deafening.

Less than a week after we published the Cambridge Analytica story, I had a short, sharp insight into why this might be so: a vivid, painful, firsthand experience of the long reach of the British establishment. Facebook’s share price was still crashing, Zuckerberg had finally emerged from his Silicon Valley lair to make a statement (“sorry”) and story after story was continuing to land. But back in the Observer’s newsroom we were battling to get out our next set of articles.

Wylie’s next revelations involved Cambridge Analytica’s Canadian associate, AIQ. And whistleblower Shahmir Sanni was set to allege how Vote Leave had broken British electoral laws by funnelling a huge overpayment through the youth campaign BeLeave – of which he had been a leading member – to the firm. An overpayment that the Electoral Commission has now ruled was illegal.

But the day before publication we hit an obstacle, just as we had with Facebook. Only this time it wasn’t a technology firm trying to thwart us: it was the government. The prime minister’s political secretary released a statement via the No 10 press office smearing Sanni, outing him as gay, calling the story rubbish.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Whistleblower Shahmir Sanni was publicly outed by a Downing Street official after he alleged that the official Brexit campaign breached spending limits and used data firm AIQ, linked to controversial Cambridge Analytica. Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

This was the story that dominated the sparse coverage, that was briefed to the Mail on Sunday who ran a banner headline: “PM’s aide in toxic sex row over pro-Brexit cash plot”. And, apparently, to the producers of the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. I’d been invited on to “talk about your story” but I wasn’t asked a single question about Sanni. In the BBC canteen later, a senior member of the team said it all seemed to be a bit overblown by what was obviously a bitter ex-boyfriend.

Sanni has been vindicated. Fully and completely. But questions about the role of the prime minister’s office in seeking to whitewash the story and the way Vote Leave briefed and spun the media remain unanswered.

And the wider questions about the multiple crimes and alleged crimes – nine serious or criminal investigations now in all – committed during the referendum remain a side show. In America, it looks as if it could be the breaking of campaign finance laws that catches out Trump, not Russian collusion. Here, apparently, we care about neither.

A week ago, I came across a tweet I’d posted last December. It showed screenshots from Julian Assange, Arron Banks and the Russian embassy that were eerily similar. They’d all picked up the same news report and shared the same criticism, and from Assange and Banks, at least, the same nickname for me (“Carole Codswallop”).

What struck me is how we now know so much more. We know the source of Banks’s wealth is now the subject of a National Crime Agency investigation. We know from emails the Observer saw and that parliament has published, that Banks had a relationship with Russian embassy officials. We know now – from Mueller – that “Organization 1” – widely believed to be WikiLeaks – was communicating directly with Russian intelligence. We know that the echoes between Assange and Banks and the Russian embassy are not just eerie, but require investigating.

We know. But we ignore. Last Friday saw the winter solstice, the darkest day of 2018. We have to hope we are moving close to the light. But I see no sign of it.