Christopher Wylie
Christopher Wylie is a British-Canadian data scientist best known for his role as the whistleblower in the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal, as well as reporting cybercrimes in the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum.
Wylie has received several international recognitions, including TIME 100, Forbes 30 Under 30, Politico’s 50 Most Influential People in Politics and Business Insider’s 100 Most Influential People in Tech. He often appears as a tech commentator on primetime news shows on CNN, MSNBC, BBC and has been profiled in several documentaries, including Netflix’s The Great Hack.
Wylie is also an experienced political strategist, having previously been an advisor to the Canadian Prime Minister’s Office and UK Cabinet Office. Starting his career early, he became the youngest full-time advisor to any party leader in the Canadian Parliament at the age of 17, where he was one of the first political advisors dedicated to data and technology. Following a secondment on the 2008 Obama campaign, Wylie became a prominent expert in the then-emerging field of political microtargeting. Wylie was the first to deploy the technique outside the United States for elections in Canada and later the UK. He went on to design some of the world’s first online microtargeting programmes, as well as the first-ever scaled use of psychometrics in predicting voter behaviour.
After several years in politics, Wylie was recruited to work at the British defence contractor SCL Group where he worked with NATO clients on a variety of counter-extremism and counter-propaganda projects across Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia. SCL was later acquired by an American billionaire and re-named Cambridge Analytica, where Wylie was kept on as the new firm’s research director.
In 2018, Wylie worked with The Guardian and New York Times as a whistleblower to expose Cambridge Analytica’s role on the Trump campaign, its misuse of Facebook data and Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. His evidence led to a $5.1 billion sanction against Facebook from the FTC and SEC – to date, the largest-ever financial sanction of a tech company in history. As a result, Wylie became a highly visible advocate for legislative reforms in the technology sector. He has testified at the US Congress five times and frequently advises governments in Europe and around the world on AI regulation.
His bestselling book Mindf*ck documents the evolution of cyber warfare on social media platforms and showcases how scaled disinformation can undermine election integrity. The book was described by The Guardian as an “invaluable primer on psychological warfare” and was listed as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Evening Standard (UK). At its release, it was reviewed in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian and The Sunday Times (UK), It is now translated into 10 languages and continues to be a bestseller on Amazon across multiple tech categories.
Most recently, Wylie advises the C-suites of multiple Fortune 500 companies, with a particular focus on building generative AI tools for the creative sectors. His work on automated systems for trend forecasting has contributed to the tech transformations of several of the world’s largest retail brands. A recognised expert in cultural trend forecasting, Wylie has also been featured in Vogue, Dazed, GQ, Esquire and PAPER.
Wylie is an alumni of the London School of Economics (LSE) and lives in London, UK.
He is also the co-host ofCaptured, Coda Story's latest narrative podcast for Audible.
