Cambridge Analytica-linked academic spurns idea Facebook swayed election

Aleksandr Kogan, who harvested Facebook profiles, dismisses idea as 'science fiction' during Senate hearing

The academic researcher who harvested personal data from Facebook for a political consultancy firm said on Tuesday that the idea the data was useful in swaying voters' decisions was "science fiction".

"People may feel angry and violated if they think their data was used in some kind of mind-control project," Aleksandr Kogan, the now notorious Cambridge University psychologist whose app collected data on up to 87 million Facebook users, said during a US Senate hearing. "This is science fiction. The data is entirely ineffective."