Last Updated Mar 27, 2018 7:14 AM EDT
LONDON — The whistleblower at the heart of the Facebook privacy scandal has testified before British lawmakers investigating the increasing rise of fake news. Christopher Wylie has alleged that Cambridge Analytica harvested details of 50 million Facebook users and used the material in U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
It is alleged the material made it possible to micro-target users with campaign material.
Wylie told lawmakers that Canadian company AggregateIQ worked on software designed to identify Republican voters ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
“There’s now tangible proof in the public domain that AIQ actually built Ripon, which is the software that utilized the algorithms from the Facebook data,” Wylie said.
AggregateIQ told Reuters on Saturday that it had never worked with Cambridge Analytica.
Meanwhile, the BBC reported that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will not testify before British lawmakers about the scandal. Zuckerberg will instead send his Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer or Chief Product Officer Chris Cox to appear before the U.K. committee.
In the U.S., Wylie agreed to Democrats’ requests that he testify before and provide documents to the committee.
Democrats had struck a defiant stance after Republicans’ announcement last week. A lawyer for Wylie confirmed to CBS News that Wylie would appear and that the committee had been duly informed of his intention to do so. Committee officials said they were expecting both testimony and documents from Wylie in the coming weeks.
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