March 20, 2018

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix Was Just Suspended

His removal came just as video emerged of him and another executive boasting about ties to the Trump campaign.

Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm deeply involved in President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, announced Tuesday that it has removed CEO Alexander Nix from the company. The suspension comes one day after Britain’s Channel 4 News published an explosive video from a months-long undercover investigation that captured the firm’s top executives discussing various ways it offered to entrap politicians, including using sex workers.

“Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation,” Cambridge Analytica board members said in a statement Tuesday.

As Cambridge Analytica announced Nix’s departure, Channel 4 News published a second video Tuesday that showed Nix boasting about running all of the Trump campaign’s digital operations. He also admits to having personally met Trump.

“We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy,” Nix is seen saying in the video.

Over the weekend, news reports also revealed how Cambridge Analytica secretly harvested private data from 50 million Facebook users.

The fallout from Channel 4’s reporting has been staggering, with Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg under intense fire for the data breach.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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