“Things don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they are believed.” So said Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, before his suspension last week following a scandal that while rooted in the UK reverberated around the world.

Nix’s remarks perfectly sum up the working maxim of the British data firm whose shady operations globally have now been exposed to the world. The harvesting of data from Facebook users, creating sex scandals, using fake news to swing voters - these are just some of the disclosures that have thrown Cambridge Analytica (CA) into the glare of public scrutiny.

CA has so far denied any accusations of wrongdoing and has since issued a statement asserting that the middleman, Global Science Research (GSR), was entirely to blame for any violations of Facebook's policies. GSR was the commercial company that harvested data using a personality app under the guise of academic research and later shared the data with CA.

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But before its scandal-induced destruction, CA’s pernicious and manipulative tendrils were to be found yanking on the strings of key political developments from Africa to Latin America.

Just last year the then CEO Nix said that that the company was involved in up to then campaigns for prime ministers and presidents every year.

“Right now we’re active in national campaigns in Asia, Africa and Europe and South America,” Nix said at the time.

CA is neither the first nor the only company to engage in these electoral dark arts.

For as long as elections have existed, there have been those who have sought to fix the results, but as was highlighted last week, the CA revelations have also profoundly revealed the extent to which other technology companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google are in some ways complicit.

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By facilitating or amplifying the work done by companies like CA they have, as the Washington Post said, contributed to the “poisoning of democracies around the world.”

Among the examples are accusations by UN officials investigating claims of genocide in Myanmar, that Facebook was used to spread vitriol against Rohingya Muslims.

Twitter meanwhile was left embarrassed after the Somalia-based terrorist group Al-Shabab live tweeted its attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in 2013 leaving family members distraught.

But last week it was CA that was attracting the negative headlines, raising questions over the scale of its involvement in manipulating political events and the methods worldwide it has deployed in order to do so. So, just where has the company been meddling?

Africa: "Vindication and alarm"

Perhaps nowhere in recent times has the influence of CA been more sharply felt than in Kenya. Like many Kenyans the political analyst and writer Nanjala Nyabola received the news of CA’s troubles last week with a mixture of “vindication and alarm”

“Vindication, because we had already seen the footprints of various data analytics firms like CA all over our contentious, yet-unresolved 2017 election; alarm because we still don't know what exactly CA did in Kenya beyond its PR operations,” said Nyabola author of a forthcoming book entitled “Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics.”

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What is known is that CA mined Kenyan voters’ data to help President Uhuru Kenyatta win disputed elections. Over two presidential election cycles, it presided over some of the darkest and most vicious campaigns Kenya has ever seen.

In 2017, the rights organisation Privacy International claimed that Kenyatta’s ruling Jubilee Party spent $6m to contract CA while the opposition retained Aristotle, Inc for its own analytics operation.

Prior to this in Kenya in 2012, a young consultant working for a company affiliated with CA in the country was found dead in his hotel room.

Dan Muresan, a Romanian, was working for President Kenyatta ahead of the 2013 polls before his death under unclear circumstances.

Muresan was the predecessor of Christopher Wylie, the CA whistleblower whose disclosures started the train of revelations last week.

“I didn’t notice at the time when I first joined...he (Dan) was just found dead in his hotel room. That’s why they had a vacancy,” Wylie said in an interview he gave last week at London’s Frontline Club, a well-known venue for foreign correspondents and journalists.

“I can’t say he was murdered…He died in his hotel room,” Wylie later said.

What is clear from the secret video shot of CA managing director Mark Turnbull is that the data company worked closely with Kenyatta’s ruling Jubilee Party.

“We have rebranded the entire party twice, written their manifesto, done two rounds of 50,000 surveys…We’d write all the speeches and stage the whole thing, so just about every element of his campaign,” Turnbull was caught on camera saying.

Kenyan journalist Larry Madowo is unequivocal in his assertion that CA helped hijack Kenya’s democracy and was paid millions of dollars for doing so.

“It manipulated voters with apocalyptic attack ads and smeared Kenyatta’s opponent Raila Odinga as violent, corrupt and dangerous,” wrote Madowo.

“The two rivals might have since reconciled with a famous handshake, but that cannot erase the fact that innocent lives were lost because of a divisive campaign or that tribal rifts were opened with long-lasting effects,” added Madowo.

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But in terms of Africa it’s not only in Kenya that the long arm of CA has reached. New information on the operations of the firm suggests it also had a controversial role in Nigeria’s 2015 Presidential election

Reports now indicate that ahead of the poll a Nigerian billionaire and supporter of former President Goodluck Jonathan paid £2million to CA to hack into the medical records of leading opposition candidate General Muhammadu Buhari, and to orchestrate a ferocious campaign against him.

“It was the kind of campaign that was our bread and butter,” one CA ex-employee reportedly said.

“We’re employed by a billionaire who’s panicking at the idea of a change of government and who wants to spend big to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

According to reports, Goodluck Jonathan didn’t know about the role CA played in his failed 2015 re-election bid, despite the fact that the CA team were lodged in hotel in the Nigerian capital Abuja for weeks before the election campaign.

In one fear mongering video, CA used the suggestion that the election of Buhari would usher in an Islamic style law and regime.

“Coming to Nigeria on February 15th, 2015,” the video’s voiceover says in the manner of a trailer for a Hollywood movie. “Dark. Scary. And very uncertain. Sharia for all.” And then it poses the question: “What would Nigeria look like if sharia were imposed by Buhari?”

In answering the question one minute and 19 seconds of archive news footage from Nigeria’s troubled past set to a horror movie soundtrack are used to instil fear in those watching.

The CA scandal comes in the same year that 20 African countries are going to hold national elections. With its role now exposed in public, it remains difficult to estimate the extent CA’s influence might continue to have in such ballots. There are fears too that even if CA has been neutered, the possibility exists that other firms using identical methods may well have existing operations in Africa. But Africa is not the only place where CA’s strategy has been deployed.

Asia: A fertile market

CA has been described as experimenting abroad wherever “privacy rules are lax or non-existent.”

In Asia social media growth has been so rapid that regulators have had little chance of keeping up. In such places CA found operating comparatively easy, often working through front organisations that obscure its signature involvement.

While there is no evidence that CA has directly meddled in election in Asia, local subsidiaries have certainly been busy in India and Malaysia while its lobbyists have courted Australian politicians.

Right now India has the largest number of Facebook users worldwide with 250 million registered on the site, ideal data harvesting fields for the likes of CA.

India’s two biggest political movements, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and opposition Indian National Congress, are both reported to have been in talks with CA and its local partner ahead of national elections scheduled for next year.

“Asian political leaders have been quick to distance themselves form scandal-hit voter profiling by CA,” observed Alan Boyd of the Asia Times.

Last week Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak denied claims his government had ever engaged CA, and instead accused his rival Mahathir Mohamad’s son as the person who had used the company’s controversial services before he crossed sides to join the opposition.

If they did want to influence elections, unethical data mining companies would find a fertile market in much of Asia, due to high social media growth, regulatory gaps and a tradition of electoral abuses.

According to the 2018 Freedom in the World rankings by Freedom House an independent watchdog that analyses challenges to democracy, only six of 34 countries in the region surveyed were rated as having total political rights while 12 countries were ranked as having none at all.

In such environments CA and its equivalents would find it easy to operate, not least when as some reports suggest, they have former MI6 agents and Israeli intelligence companies providing CA clients with a report on “all the skeletons” in their opponents’ closets.

South and Central America: “The brain behind the Mexican elections.”

CA’s reach has also found its way to Central and South America. Just last Wednesday Brazilian prosecutors opened an investigation into whether the company acted illegally in the country having been suspected of using the data of millions of Brazilians to create psychographic profiles through its partnership with Sao Paulo-based consulting group A Ponte Estrategia Planejamento e Pesquisa LTDA.

Brazil is Facebook’s third-largest market, and Brazilians will be holding a major election in less than seven months.

BuzzFeed in Mexico also reported that another CA executive started last year to hire data analysts in nine states in Mexico, presenting the job post on LinkedIn as “the brain behind the Mexican elections.”

Around the same time CA’s vice president said that the partnership was transparently designed to influence the votes of younger Mexicans with Mexico's general election due on July 1.

Elsewhere across the region CA on its webpage also notes Colombia as one of its major operations centres, quoting Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa of the Green Party as one of its advisers, though the mayor’s office denied any links with the company.

In Guyana, Peru and Argentina, CA has also been busy.

Alexander Nix CA’s CEO acknowledged advocating the use of “street media” such as graffiti and fly posters and insisted it was “normal election practice in many of the Caribbean islands.”

And so the story of how CA and its affiliates have extended their long reach continues to unravel.

In recent days certain countries have gone to considerable lengths to distance themselves from CA. But the story in many developing countries is quite different.

“While Cambridge Analytica may face sanctions on both sides of the Atlantic, it will likely still get away with mischief and dangerous mind games in Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America,” observed Kenyan journalist Larry Madowo.

His thinking is echoed by the results released last Thursday by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a respected German think tank. In its latest index of the health of democracy and governance in 129 developing countries, its finding were grim.

“In more and more countries, government leaders are deliberately undermining the checks and balances designed to hold the executive accountable, thereby securing not only their power, but a system of patronage and the capacity to divert state resources for their own personal gain,” the report warned.

CA and its ilk have played their own part in such a corrosive process. The daunting challenge now is to prevent others from doing the same.