MALACAÑANG on Tuesday denied Cambridge Analytica’s key role in the election campaign of Davao mayor Rodrigo Duterte that led to his landslide victory in the 2016 presidential elections.
Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque said Duterte received his votes “fair and square” because of the trust and confidence put in him by more than 16-million Filipinos.
Roque, in quoting Finance secretary Carlos Dominquez III, who was then Duterte’s election campaign manager, said “no money was spent to seek any advice from the political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica.”
“The Secretary of Finance, in his capacity as treasurer of the PRRD campaign, assures [the public] that he did not pay anything to Cambridge Analytica nor did he transact with them,” Roque said.
The South China Morning Post newspaper linked Strategic Communications Laboratories, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, to Duterte’s associates and some members of his campaign team.
Roque said there was no need for Duterte to seek help from Cambridge Analytica to win the 2016 elections as insinuated by a report published in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.
The report was triggered after Facebook admitted that about 1,175,870 Filipino users might have had their Facebook information improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.
But Roque said Duterte won the 2016 elections because of the support of the grassroots level, and that there had been no need to buy any information from Cambridge Analytica.
“Support for the former Davao City mayor was from all sectors and not just from Facebook or online; thus the Duterte campaign did not have to purchase information,” Roque said.
“We should respect the President’s landslide victory, which was the result of the trust and confidence of the Filipino people and not undermine it with unsubstantiated allegations.”
The political consultancy firm is being linked to the alleged tapping of around 50 million Facebook users’ date to aid Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential campaign.
Facebook ranked the Philippines as the second most affected country by Cambridge Analytica’s data breach, with at least 1.175 million accounts of Filipino users believed to have been stolen.
