Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who exposed the Facebook scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica, testifies before the US Congress.
Wylie has accepted an invitation to do so, he says via Twitter.
I have accepted invitations to testify next week at the US House Intelligence Committee and House Judiciary Committee. Democracies around the world are under threat from malicious actors who seek to use social media as an information battleground. We must take this seriously. pic.twitter.com/yths0afWJo
— Christopher Wylie (@chrisinsilico) April 21, 2018
“Worldwide, democracies are threatened by malicious actors who use social media as an information battlefield,” he adds. “We have to take this seriously.”
Wylie worked for Cambridge Analytica and in March via The Guardian and The New York Times revealed the potential abuse of data by millions of Facebook users. The data collected by Cambridge Analytica would have been used for, among other things, the election campaign of Donald Trump and the Leave camp of the Brexit referendum.
Since the revelations, the privacy policy of Facebook is under scrutiny. Topman Mark Zuckerberg was interrogated earlier this month by the American Congress. This was not just about Cambridge Analytica, but also about Russian interference, fake news and online privacy in general.
Statement
Wylie was already a guest in the UK at the end of March to testify about the abuse of the Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica. There he said, among other things, that it is “fundamentally false” that Cambridge Analytica did not use the data for political advertising, which the company claims.
When the interview with the American Congress takes place exactly, it is not known. It is also unclear whether the testimony is public or takes place behind closed doors.
Europe
Wylie says on Twitter that she also “likes” to talk to the European Parliament. “There are more active Facebook users in the European Union than in the United States,” he explains. “That makes Mark Zuckerberg’s reluctance to speak to international legislators the more disappointing.”
Zuckerberg has already been invited to travel to Brussels in March but has not yet accepted that invitation. According to the latest figures, Facebook had 370 million monthly active users at the end of 2017 in Europe. In the United States, there were 239 million at the time.
