SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor who bankrolled Cambridge Analytica _ the data consulting firm at the center of Facebook's latest privacy scandal _ also was the largest donor to a group that targeted swing state voters with anti-Muslim ads during the 2016 U.S. elections.
OpenSecrets got hold of IRS records that show Mercer gave $2 million in 2016 to Secure America Now, a group that worked with Facebook and Google to target voters in states such as Nevada and North Carolina.
Last year, Facebook and Google defended their role in pushing the anti-Muslim ads on their platforms. Bloomberg reported that the companies worked "closely" with Secure America Now to place ads that included imagining an "Islamic States of America" or featured a burqa-clad Mona Lisa _ ads that seemed to be meant to alarm people who feared Muslims or didn't want Syrian refugees to enter the United States.
Google later took down some of the ads, while Facebook said it didn't work directly with Secure America Now and pointed to COO Sheryl Sandberg's statements that the social media giant needs to allow for free expression even when it doesn't agree.
Other donors to Secure America Now in 2016, according to OpenSecrets: Estee Lauder heir Ronald Lauder, former Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson, investor Foster Friess and Olympus Ventures, which is tied to a foundation created by Best Buy founder Dick Schulze. OpenSecrets also reported last month that Secure America Now received $2 million from 45Committee, a pro-Trump political group.
Secure America Now is a nonprofit organization created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to fight against the construction of a mosque near ground zero in New York City.
As for Cambridge Analytica, it is being investigated for misuse of data of tens of millions of Facebook users that was obtained without their permission. Cambridge Analytica was founded by Mercer and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and was used by the campaigns of President Donald Trump and others.
This week, Cambridge Analytica released a statement that said it did not use the Facebook data it obtained from the research company GSR "in the work we did in the 2016 US presidential election."
Records show the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $5.9 million, although the Trump campaign said the data it used came from the Republican National Committee instead.
Former Cambridge Analytica employee and whistleblower Christopher Wylie told different media outlets last month that the consulting firm used Facebook data to build a system that could profile individual voters to target them with political ads.
"We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles," Wylie told the Observer, the sister paper of the Guardian. "And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on."
