The London company, founded by former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon and Robert Mercer, a wealthy Republican donor who has put at least $15 million into it, offered tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior.

The decision came after a television broadcast in which Nix was recorded suggesting unseemly practices to influence foreign elections.

NEW YORK — Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm with ties to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, on Tuesday, amid a furor over the access it gained to private information on more than 50 million Facebook users.


Nix’s suspension was one of several developments Tuesday as pressure — from state capitals to Congress and federal regulators to Britain’s Parliament — intensified on Facebook to be more forthcoming about what it knew about the use of its data and about what it intends to do to safeguard its users’ privacy.

In Washington, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into whether Facebook had violated an agreement with the agency on data privacy.

The action follows investigations jointly launched by Massachusetts and New York into Facebook’s handling of personal data. New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said his office would also investigate.

The British Parliament called for a hearing with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive. Several senators have also called for him to appear in Washington.

Adding to concerns about the company is the impending departure of Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer. That change reflects heightened leadership tension at the company.

Recent news has pummeled Facebook’s stock, which closed Tuesday at $168.15, down 2.5 percent, after tumbling Monday.

Cambridge Analytica’s so-called psychographic modeling techniques, built in part with the data harvested from Facebook, underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016. Nix once called the practice “our secret sauce,” though some have questioned its effectiveness.


In a joint investigation published online Saturday, The New York Times and The Observer of London detailed the firm’s acquisition and use of Facebook data.

On Monday, a British TV news report also cast the company in a harsh light, showing video of Cambridge Analytica executives offering to entrap politicians.

In the video, Nix suggested ideas for a prospective client looking for help in a foreign election. The firm could send an attractive woman to seduce a rival candidate and secretly videotape the encounter, Nix said, or send someone posing as a wealthy land developer to pass a bribe. “We have a long history of working behind the scenes,” Nix said.

The prospective client was actually a reporter from Channel 4 News in Britain, and the encounter was secretly filmed as part of a monthslong investigation.

Announcing the CEO’s suspension, the company said that “in the view of the board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation.”

The company asked Alexander Tayler, its chief data officer, “to serve as acting CEO while an independent investigation is launched to review those comments and allegations.” The company also said it had hired a lawyer, Julian Malins, “to lead this investigation, the findings of which the board will share publicly in due course.”

It added: “The board will be monitoring the situation closely, working closely with Dr. Tayler, to ensure that Cambridge Analytica, in all of its operations, represents the firm’s values and delivers the highest-quality service to its clients.”


Tayler trained as a chemical engineer and joined Cambridge Analytica in 2014 as its lead data scientist, according to his LinkedIn profile. Malins is a seasoned corporate lawyer who has worked on complex litigation, with an expertise in asset recovery and money laundering cases.

Some observers said suspending Nix was, at most, a first step.

“If they think ‘suspending’ a chief executive even approaches proportionality for this kind of mass data breach, they underestimate people & institutions who will fight for #privacy rights & for Facebook to account for their actions,” Claude Moraes, a Labour Party official who represents London in the European Parliament, wrote on Twitter.

The FTC investigation is tied to a 2011 settlement the agency reached with Facebook. The agency had accused the company of deceiving customers “by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public,” according to a statement at the time.

Among several violations, the FTC found that Facebook told users third-party apps on the social media site, like games, would not be allowed to access data. But the apps, the agency found, were able to obtain almost all personal information about a user.

The data on the 50 million users was harvested in 2014 by an outside researcher, Alexander Kogan. Kogan, a professor at Cambridge University, paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which collected private information from their profiles and from those of their friends. Facebook allowed that sort of data collection at the time. Then, as The Times reported over the weekend, Kogan gave the information to Cambridge Analytica. Passing the information to a third party violated Facebook’s policies, the company said last week.


“We are aware of the issues that have been raised but cannot comment on whether we are investigating,” an FTC spokeswoman said in a statement Tuesday. “We take any allegations of violations of our consent decrees very seriously.”

Facebook said it expected to receive questions from the FTC related to potential violations of its 2011 consent decree.

“We remain strongly committed to protecting people’s information. We appreciate the opportunity to answer questions the FTC may have,” Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer, Rob Sherman, said in a statement.

The agency’s action against Facebook in 2011 was considered a landmark in privacy enforcement. The company could face fines of $40,000 a day per violation if the agency finds it violated the settlement.