Christopher Wylie

“It turns out that Republicans can accept a batshit insane candidate, so long as it’s consistent insanity.”

― Christopher Wylie

“Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy.”

― Christopher Wylie

“Facebook knows more about you than any other person in your life, even your wife.”

― Christopher Wylie

“What Cambridge Analytica did was use complex corporate setups across jurisdictions not only to launder money but to launder something that was becoming just as valuable: your data.”

― Christopher Wylie

“perspecticide – the active deconstruction and manipulation of popular perception – you first have to understand on a deep level what motivates”

― Christopher Wylie

“In psychological warfare, the weak points are flaws in how people think. If you’re trying to hack a person’s mind, you need to identify cognitive biases and then exploit them.”

― Christopher Wylie

“We are all vulnerable to manipulation. We make judgments based on the information available to us, but we are all susceptible to manipulation when our access to that information becomes mediated. Over time, our biases can become amplified without our even realising it.”

― Christopher Wylie

“The first tool of authoritarian regimes is always informational control—both in the gathering of information on the public through surveillance and the filtration of information to the public through owned media. In its early days, the Internet seemed to pose a challenge to authoritarian regimes, but with the advent of social media, we are watching the construction of architectures that fulfill the needs of every authoritarian regime: surveillance and information control. Authoritarian movements are possible only when the general public becomes habituated to—and numbed by—a new normal.”

― Christopher Wylie

"If you run campaigns designed to undermine people’s ability to make free choices and to understand what is real and not real, you are undermining democracy and treating voters in the same way as you are treating terrorists."

― Christopher Wylie

"The only morality of the algorithm is to optimise you as a consumer and in many cases you become the product. There are very few examples in human history of industries where people themselves become products and those are scary industries – slavery and the sex trade. And now we have social media."

― Christopher Wylie

"Data is morally neutral. I can take a knife and hand it to a chef to make an amazing meal, or murder someone with it. The tool is morally neutral, it’s the application that matters."

― Christopher Wylie

"If we replace everyone with robots, what’s the point of humanity then? Shall we all just sit in those floating chairs they have in the film WALL-E and be fed through a tube and entertained through AI-generated TV shows which are hyper-personalised to my profile? What a shit future that would be right? We shouldn’t be endeavouring to replace human creativity with artificial creativity."

― Christopher Wylie