Cambridge Analytica: The $4 Quiz That Exposed 87 Million Facebook Users

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Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 by Alexander Nix, Nigel Oakes and Alexander Oakes as a spinoff of SCL Group, a British defense contractor that described itself as a global election management agency and had worked on psychological operations. Backed by a reported $50 million or more from the Mercer family and support from Steve Bannon, it promised to target voters by personality rather than demographics. Its data came from Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan's Facebook app, This Is Your Digital Life, which paid about 270,000 people around $4 each to take a personality quiz. Facebook's Graph API version 1.0 also handed over their friends' profiles, sweeping in up to 87 million people who never took the quiz.

Using Big Five personality modeling based on Michal Kosinski's research, the firm sorted American adults into 32 personality styles and worked for Ted Cruz's 2015 campaign and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, while executives claimed work in more than 200 elections worldwide. In March 2018, The New York Times and The Observer published Christopher Wylie's account, and Channel 4 News aired hidden-camera footage of Nix discussing honey traps, bribery stings and self-destructing emails. Facebook lost $37 billion in market value, and Cambridge Analytica and SCL filed for insolvency on May 1, 2018. The episode lays out the academic debate over whether psychographic targeting worked at all.

• The Cruz campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $750,000.
• In 2020 the UK Information Commissioner's Office concluded that Cambridge Analytica was not involved in the EU referendum campaign, despite whistleblower claims from Wylie and Brittany Kaiser.
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission placed 20-year restrictions on both Nix and Kogan.
• Meta agreed in 2022 to a $725 million settlement of a class action over the data harvesting.
• Former staff resurfaced at firms including Emerdata, Auspex International and Data Propria, and in July 2026 the Cambridge Analytica website reappeared as an automated content farm.