Cambridge Analytica: Whistleblower suspended from Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram

Christopher Wylie, the man at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, has had his account suspended by Facebook. The whistleblower has accused his former employers of harvesting personal information from more than 50m American Facebook users in order to pass it on to third parties affiliated with the Donald Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election, enabling them to microtarget potential swing voters with tailored party political advertising. Wylie told The Observer that the start-up he once worked for had used data originally collected from the Facebook pages of paid participants in an academic study and those of their wider friendship networks in order to pass it on to Trump's then-campaign manager Steve Bannon for strategic purposes. The whistleblower joined Twitter in the run-up to the story's publication and tweeted yesterday that Facebook had disabled his account. On something they have known privately for 2 years.