Bannon Promoted ‘Cultural War’ Through Cambridge Analytica

President Donald Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon attempted to use the personal information that was illegally harvested online, as a way to promote “a culture war,” Reuters reported.

At that time, Bannon was the vice president of Cambridge Analytica, and he “saw cultural warfare as a means to create enduring change in American politics,” testified the whistleblower on now-defunct political data firm Cambridge Analytica.

On Wednesday Christopher Wylie  also told U.S. senators that information about tens of millions of Facebook users ended up in Cambridge Analytica hands.

Reuters writes that Wylie, who previously worked for SCL, the British-based parent of Cambridge Analytica, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Cambridge Analytica hired hackers to collect data it then used against opponents of its political clients.

Bannon was one of Trump’s main campaign strategists and also became a White House aide when Trump took office in January 2017, but left in August 2017.

According to Reuters, Wylie showed reports on how the company managed to use the data it collected from Facebook, telling details on how the firm did their suppressing of voters, exploiting racial tensions as well as testing campaign slogans in 2014 for use in 2016.

“One of the things that did provoke me to leave was the beginnings of discussions of voter disengagement, I have seen documents reference and I recall conversations that it was intended to focus on African-American voters,” Wylie said.

“The company learned that there were segments of the population that responded to messages like ‘drain the swamp’ or images of border walls or indeed paranoia about the ‘deep state’ that weren’t necessarily reflected in mainstream polling or mainstream political discourse that Steve Bannon was interested in to help build his movement,” Wylie stressed.

Tufts University associate professor Eitan Hersh, who also testified, said that he was “skeptical” of the effect that such political targeting can do.  “No person is persuadable all the time,” he said.