Top 66 Christopher Wylie Quotes

The United States is walking in the same direction as China, we’re just allowing private companies to monetize left, right and center. Just because it’s not the state doesn’t mean that there isn’t harmful impacts that could come if you have one or two large companies monitoring or tracking everything you do.

When you work in Kenyan politics, or politics in a lot of African countries, if a deal goes wrong you can pay for it. When you work for senior politicians in a lot of these countries you don’t actually make money in the electoral work, you make money in the influence brokering after that.

When I saw how Russia was involved and pushing for Trump, I contacted the FBI. But at the time, they were confident Clinton would get elected and the last thing they wanted to do is show some kind of bias, especially because there was already a controversy with Clinton’s email.

In politics, the money man is usually the dumbest person in the room.

When you talk to people in fashion, it’s like, people wear clothes because it’s who they are and what they like. It’s as simple as that. It’s just about creating a way of measuring that.

The thing that I realized in my journey as a whistleblower… is that the reaction that I got from a lot of law enforcement and regulatory agencies was confusion and bafflement.

I’ve never seen a billion dollars. I don’t think anybody has.

It’s important that queer people get visibility, particularly when they look, act, and speak in the way that they’re comfortable with.

It’s unfortunate that Facebook, as soon as I come and speak out, they ban me from their platforms.

If we want to prevent another Cambridge Analytica from happening… that starts with regulating big tech beyond just data protection issues, but also looking at whether or not we want as a society to tolerate manipulative design.

One of the things that I learned about myself is that I can get involved in an idea and forget, in a really terrible way, what are the actual consequences of what I’m working on?

What’s different with Cambridge Analytica and more broadly with social media is that you are the target. People want to harvest your information in as granular a way as possible in order to, like, create a picture, a complete picture of who you are, ultimately to either sell you things or make you believe things.

Conscientious people like structure, so for them, a solution to immigration should be orderly, and a wall embodied that.

Although the most amount of attention went to what happened in the United States and in Brexit, Cambridge Analytica and its predecessor, SCL Group, worked in countries around the world, particularly in the developing world, to manipulate elections for their clients. So it was global.

Manipulating an election in a small developing country doesn’t have the same sort of ripple effect of electing Donald Trump into the White House.

Even though Cambridge Analytica has dissolved, the capabilities are still there, the platforms are still there, the people are still there. What happens when China becomes the next Cambridge Analytica? Like anything, the second, third, fourth time you do something, you start to refine and perfect it.

Different people choose different clothes and it correlates with their politics.

I got a call from the Lib Dems. They wanted to upgrade their databases and voter targeting. So, I combined working for them with studying for my degree.

Fashion is very complicated for machines to learn – something that is intuitive for a human is usually the hardest thing to teach a computer.

In most Western democracies, you do have the freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not an entitlement to reach. You are free to say what you want, within the confines of hate speech, libel law and so on. But you are not entitled to have your voice artificially amplified by technology.

We should be challenging and reforming our legislation around the world to actually combat hostile actors, whether they’re domestic or foreign.

Fashion brands are really useful in producing algorithms to find out how people think and how they feel.

I am accepting my share of responsibility in what happens with Cambridge Analytica. I think that Facebook should also accept some share of responsibility as to what happened.

I’m sorry Alex Jones, but the content that InfoWars has been putting out is just flat out lies. You are entitled to say whatever it is that you want, that is fine; you are not entitled to a megaphone if that information is false.

I don’t believe in data-driven anything, it’s the most stupid phrase. Data should always serve people, people should never serve data.

The work of Cambridge Analytica is not equivalent to traditional marketing. Cambridge Analytica specialized in disinformation, spreading rumors, kompromat, and propaganda.

What makes clothing so potent is that people incorporate the fashion that they’re wearing into their identity. It becomes part of you and how you show yourself to the world.

We need to change our mindset and understand that the protection of our democracy is a national security issue. When any country interferes with your democracy, they are attacking you.

I’ve worked in a lot of elections and it can feel like you’re fighting a battle. You get into a mindset of ‘we’ve got to win. If they’re doing it, we’re going to do it too.’

It’s important that people see that you can be a whistleblower and you can be different.

You know, my concern is that even if Cambridge Analytica has dissolved as a company, its capabilities haven’t.

There are not sufficient regulatory frameworks to handle the amount of power that companies like Facebook have, particularly in the United States.

Cambridge Analytica will try to pick at whatever mental weakness or vulnerability that we think you have and try to warp your perception of what’s real around you.

Amazon has a good track record for blowing up industries, and fashion needs to look at what has happened to music, publishing and media.

Steve Bannon, you know, discovered that there’s nothing more powerful than a humiliated man.

For a long time I think journalists and society at large really did drink that Kool-Aid. They bought the message that the tech industry is good and they can do no wrong.

Elections are zero-sum games. That means that there’s always one winner and a lot of losers. If you just get one more vote than the other person, you win that election.

When you’re, like, writing a Python script, it doesn’t feel like you’re doing something to someone. You just don’t think, ‘How could this actually harm people?’

The alt-right didn’t emerge from nowhere. There’s a cultural foundation that existed beforehand that was almost like the petri dish and the growing medium for the alt-right.

Amazon can afford to lose money for years on its fashion offerings. But when, if you’re a designer or a retailer, fashion is your bread and butter then you can’t.

With access to enough Facebook data, it would finally be possible to take the first stab at simulating society ‘in silico.’ The implications were astonishing: You could, in theory simulate a future society to create problems like ethnic tension or wealth disparity and watch how they play out.

Different kinds of people have different motivations for filling out surveys. Sometimes you would have a group of people who just would fill it out because they’re bored, and they don’t have anything to do. Or they would just genuinely want to know what is their personality.

If you look at how much information you put out, even just on your phone, on Facebook, on Google, whatever, you essentially create a clone of yourself online. And that’s at the disposal of these large American tech companies.

I’ve had people say, ‘Oh you’ve made whistleblowing cool.’ But it’s really not. It’s a good thing to do. And it’s the right thing to do. But it’s arduous and difficult, particularly if you are going up against something that’s really powerful and political.

So you know, when you think about all of the things that you put online – so whether it’s, you know, your – what TV shows you like or, you know, what movies you watch or what you listen to, these are all little discrete clues about sort of who you are as a person.

I tell you, those old dudes who say, ‘I don’t care about fashion,’ they’re not going out in drag. Everyone cares about fashion.

You will be a far more effective whistleblower if you operate within a legal framework.

It is extremely uncomfortable to consider that our democracy may have been corrupted. That potential crimes may have taken place – some of them on Facebook’s servers – that seem to be beyond the reach of law.

I didn’t set out to attack Facebook. Facebook has just been incredibly uncooperative. It hasn’t respected the role of the media and scrutiny and embraced this scrutiny and worked to improve itself.

Disinformation has always existed. It’s not like all of a sudden we’ve just discovered this new thing called propaganda.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube create algorithms that promote and highlight information. That is an active engineering decision.