President Donald Trump appeared to boast about his presidential campaign’s social media-cultivating tactics even as Cambridge Analytica, the data mining firm he commissioned, is roiled in controversy.
In a fiery Thursday morning tweet, Trump ― referring to himself in the third person ― countered the argument that Hillary Clinton’s social media strategy was more sophisticated than his during the 2016 election cycle.
“Well, not saying that anymore!” he wrote, seemingly referring to the scandal engulfing Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, the social network from which the firm reportedly obtained its user data. Cambridge Analytica created a technology to better target and influence individuals on Facebook through a personality quiz, allowing it to reportedly collect data on 50 million people.
The Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica ― former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was on the board ― to identify voters and the issues they were most passionate about, leading to questions about whether the technology helped propel Trump to victory. The firm has also been connected to various other political machinations, including the push for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union and Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) presidential run.
The company has denied that data acquired through Facebook was used as part of the services it offered the Trump campaign.
But the firm wasn’t able to evade the controversy, as it decided to suspend its CEO Alexander Nix on Tuesday. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the national media rounds on Wednesday to apologize for allowing a massive data breach to take place.