Are You Being Psychologically Targeted, Too? A Closer Look at Cambridge Analytica’s Kremlin-Angle

When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, the world fixated on Facebook data abuse, political manipulation, and the fragility of digital privacy. Deep within the entanglement of web data, a sinister pattern started to emerge, and it points toward Russia.

At the center of this story was Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, the statistical psychologist whose app “This Is Your Digital Life” scraped data from tens of millions of Facebook users. The app’s purpose was to build psychological profiles on users.

Kogan who was born in the former USSR maintained academic ties to St. Petersburg State University and accepted Russian government research grants while simultaneously engaging in the project that fueled the Cambridge Analytica operation.

Although Kogan rebuffed claims of espionage, the overlap raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic.

Further complicating matters were Cambridge Analytica’s business dealings. The firm held at least three meetings with representatives of Lukoil (a Russian oil giant closely tied to the Kremlin) around the time they were developing their voter-targeting model. Lukoil reportedly sought insights into how Cambridge Analytica used social media data to influence U.S. voters.

From London, then-MP Damian Collins flagged additional topics of concern: files associated with the scandal had been accessed from Russia, among other locations, according to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office.

Facebook’s own CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, later testified before U.S. lawmakers, acknowledging that connections between profiles targeted by Cambridge Analytica and those exposed to content from Russia’s Internet Research Agency (a troll farm indicted in 2018, which also has been linked to other online influence operations) were being actively investigated.

To be clear: No investigation has confirmed a direct Kremlin operation using Cambridge Analytica’s data. But the convergence is peculiar. A Russian-tied data scientist, a state-linked oil company’s curiosity, foreign access to ill-gotten information, and parallel propaganda machinery suggest this scandal was never just about Western politics.