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Use this handy checklist to guide your writings

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The original rainbow-vomiting unicorn article on Gen Y

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The original rainbow-vomiting unicorn article on Gen Y

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Say hi to Lucy.

Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She's also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.

I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group-I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.

So Lucy's enjoying her GYPSY life, and she's very pleased to be Lucy. Only issue is this one thing:

Lucy's kind of unhappy.

To get to the bottom of why, we need to define what makes someone happy or unhappy in the first place. It comes down to a simple formula:

It's pretty straightforward-when the reality of someone's life is better than they had expected, they're happy. When reality turns out to be worse than the expectations, they're unhappy.

To provide some context, let's start by bringing Lucy's parents into the discussion:

Lucy's parents were born in the 50s-they're Baby Boomers. They were raised by Lucy's grandparents, members of the G.I. Generation, or "the Greatest Generation," who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II, and were most definitely not GYPSYs.

Lucy's Depression Era grandparents were obsessed with economic security and raised her parents to build practical, secure careers. They wanted her parents' careers to have greener grass than their own, and Lucy's parents were brought up to envision a prosperous and stable career for themselves. Something like this:

They were taught that there was nothing stopping them from getting to that lush, green lawn of a career, but that they'd need to put in years of hard work to make it happen.

After graduating from being insufferable hippies, Lucy's parents embarked on their careers. As the 70s, 80s, and 90s rolled along, the world entered a time of unprecedented economic prosperity. Lucy's parents did even better than they expected to. This left them feeling gratified and optimistic.

With a smoother, more positive life experience than that of their own parents, Lucy's parents raised Lucy with a sense of optimism and unbounded possibility. And they weren't alone. Baby Boomers all around the country and world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches.

This left GYPSYs feeling tremendously hopeful about their careers, to the point where their parents' goals of a green lawn of secure prosperity didn't really do it for them. A GYPSY-worthy lawn has flowers.

This leads to our first fact about GYPSYs:

GYPSYs Are Wildly Ambitious

The GYPSY needs a lot more from a career than a nice green lawn of prosperity and security. The fact is, a green lawn isn't quite exceptional or uniqueenough for a GYPSY. Where the Baby Boomers wanted to live The American Dream, GYPSYs want to live Their Own Personal Dream.

Cal Newport points out that "follow your passion" is a catchphrase that has only gotten going in the last 20 years, according to Google's Ngram viewer, a tool that shows how prominently a given phrase appears in English print over any period of time. The same Ngram viewer shows that the phrase "a secure career" has gone out of style, just as the phrase "a fulfilling career" has gotten hot.

To be clear, GYPSYs want economic prosperity just like their parents did-they just also want to be fulfilled by their career in a way their parents didn't think about as much.

But something else is happening too. While the career goals of Gen Y as a whole have become much more particular and ambitious, Lucy has been given a second message throughout her childhood as well:

This would probably be a good time to bring in our second fact about GYPSYs:

GYPSYs Are Delusional

"Sure," Lucy has been taught, "everyone will go and get themselves some fulfilling career, but I am unusually wonderful and as such, my career and life path will stand out amongst the crowd." So on top of the generation as a whole having the bold goal of a flowery career lawn, each individual GYPSY thinks that he or she is destined for something even better-
A shiny unicorn on top of the flowery lawn.
So why is this delusional? Because this is what all GYPSYs think, which defies the definition of special:

spe-cial| 'speSHel |
adjective
better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual.

According to this definition, most people are not special-otherwise "special" wouldn't mean anything.

Even right now, the GYPSYs reading this are thinking, "Good point...but I actually am one of the few special ones"-and this is the problem.

A second GYPSY delusion comes into play once the GYPSY enters the job market. While Lucy's parents' expectation was that many years of hard work would eventually lead to a great career, Lucy considers a great career an obvious given for someone as exceptional as she, and for her it's just a matter of time and choosing which way to go. Her pre-workforce expectations look something like this:

Unfortunately, the funny thing about the world is that it turns out to not be that easy of a place, and the weird thing about careers is that they're actually quite hard. Great careers take years of blood, sweat and tears to build-even the ones with no flowers or unicorns on them-and even the most successful people are rarely doing anything that great in their early or mid-20s.

But GYPSYs aren't about to just accept that.

Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GYPSY expert, has researched this, finding that Gen Y has "unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback," and "an inflated view of oneself." He says that "a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren't in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting."

For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the interview question, "Do you feel you are generally superior to your coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?" He says that "if the candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the 'why,' there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and deservingness. They've been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow special but often lack any real justification for this belief."

And since the real world has the nerve to consider merit a factor, a few years out of college Lucy finds herself here:

Lucy's extreme ambition, coupled with the arrogance that comes along with being a bit deluded about one's own self-worth, has left her with huge expectations for even the early years out of college. And her reality pales in comparison to those expectations, leaving her "reality - expectations" happy score coming out at a negative.

And it gets even worse. On top of all this, GYPSYs have an extra problem that applies to their whole generation:

GYPSYs Are Taunted

Sure, some people from Lucy's parents' high school or college classes ended up more successful than her parents did. And while they may have heard about some of it from time to time through the grapevine, for the most part they didn't really know what was going on in too many other peoples' careers.

Lucy, on the other hand, finds herself constantly taunted by a modern phenomenon: Facebook Image Crafting.

Social media creates a world for Lucy where A) what everyone else is doing is very out in the open, B) most people present an inflated version of their own existence, and C) the people who chime in the most about their careers are usually those whose careers (or relationships) are going the best, while struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation. This leaves Lucy feeling, incorrectly, like everyone else is doing really well, only adding to her misery:

So that's why Lucy is unhappy, or at the least, feeling a bit frustrated and inadequate. In fact, she's probably started off her career perfectly well, but to her, it feels very disappointing.

Here's my advice for Lucy:

1) Stay wildly ambitious. The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success. The specific direction may be unclear, but it'll work itself out-just dive in somewhere.

2) Stop thinking that you're special. The fact is, right now, you're not special. You're another completely inexperienced young person who doesn't have all that much to offer yet. You can become special by working really hard for a long time.

3) Ignore everyone else. Other people's grass seeming greener is no new concept, but in today's image crafting world, other people's grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you'll never have any reason to envy others.

_________

If you liked this, check out:

Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
How to Pick Your Life Partner
7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook

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Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy - Wait But Why

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Say hi to Lucy. Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She's also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y. I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group-I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs.

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Simon Sinek addresses the challenges of Millennials in the workplace

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Simon Sinek on Millennials in the Workplace

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'...an aggressive longing for a mythical golden past.'

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From Spain to Turkey, the rise of the far right is a clash of cultures not civilisations | Elif Shafak

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The success of Vox and other extremists risks tearing society apart, says political scientist Elif Shafak

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C1 Advanced Speaking test - Raphael and Maude | Cambridge English

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1. Introduction

You have 90 minutes to write two texts. Each text should be about 220-260 words long (see the Questions section at the bottom if you have concerns about the word count). Part 1 is always an essay, while in part 2 you have a choice of 3 tasks (letter/email; proposal; report; review).

The examiners assess you on 4 elements:

Content - Did you do the task you were asked to do?

Communicative achievement - Did you use the right tone and level of formality?

Organisation - Did you link paragraphs together? Is there a logical flow?

Language - Did you show off your sparkling vocabulary or did you merely use First Certificate words? Did you make lots of grammar mistakes?

Before you continue with this guide, I strongly recommend you read about this free tool that will help you with your writing:

You have 90 minutes to write 2 texts. Both texts will be about the same length, and are worth the same number of points. Obviously, you should spend the same amount of time on each! Personally, I'd spend as much time planning as possible, since it makes everything else easier. The exact time split will depend on how fast you write, but try something like this:

3. You can't cook without a recipe

A lot of students hate planning and think it's a waste of valuable exam time. But do chefs walk into a kitchen and just start cooking? Of course not - they lay out their ingredients, make sure their utensils are clean, and have their recipe nearby.

Your plan is the recipe you'll use to cook up a great piece of writing. Think about how many paragraphs you want then get some ideas about the content of each. But even at this early stage you should start planning the language you want to use. Ask yourself questions like:

Where can I use a passive form?

Where can I use an inversion?

What CAE-level vocabulary do I know about this topic, and where can I use it?

How do I link from one paragraph to the next?

Thinking about solutions before you start writing is the easiest way to solve problems!

4. Grading: Content

Part 1

The first thing you're assessed on is your content. That basically means reading the task carefully and doing what you are told to do! In part 1 you are given three bullet points but are asked to talk about TWO of them. (You're also given some opinions on the topic that you can use if you want, but you don't have to.) Here's an example of the three bullet points and a task:

If I were planning my answer, I'd probably choose 'giving rules' and 'setting an example' as my two points because I feel like I have more to say about those topics. ( How much would I write about 'offering advice'? Nothing! Because I should only write about two things!)

Another important point is to say which is more effective. I'd probably write one paragraph about 'giving rules', and the next paragraph would be about 'setting an example' - I would be sure to give reasons why it was a more effective way to influence younger people.

Part 2

What about part 2? Again, it's important to read the question carefully and make sure you include everything it tells you to.

Here's the kind of task that will come up:

Here's an outline you could follow:

Not very imaginative, but you'd be guaranteed to get full marks in terms of content!

5. Grading: Communicative Achievement

Tone

Which is better English:

1. Wasssssssup?!

or

2. Dear Sir or Madam

Well, it depends who you're talking to! If your task is to write a report for your 'serious' organisation you should use a formal tone. If you're writing a magazine article for teenagers you can be more informal.

This is a HUGE topic and there's not enough space to go into it in detail here. I'll list a few external resources that might help, but a good coursebook will give you lots of guidance.

The main tip is to be consistent - students often write a report that is 95% formal, and then throw in some exclamation points, slang, contractions, and informal vocabulary. That's bad! It suggest you don't have control over your tone.

Learn more about formal vs informal English:

Task types

You should invest some time making sure you know the difference between a letter and an essay, and between a report and a proposal. Here are a few quick tips:
Essay
You need to give your opinion in an interesting way. CAE essays are often academic in tone, so practice of formal writing will be helpful.
Letter/email
Write an email with the same opening/closing as a letter. In these you write about your personal experiences. Your writing will have a purpose, like responding to a newspaper article you don't agree with.
Report/Proposal
Use headings for each paragraph. The task will tell you some of the content you need to include and you'll be able to use your imagination to add some more ideas. You may be asked to evaluate if some goal has been achieved and/or to suggest alternative courses of action. A proposal will have more scope for making suggestions and more need for polite persuasive language.

6. Grading: Organisation

Cambridge love linking words and cohesive devices. These are bits of text like 'firstly', 'whereas', 'in addition', 'however', and so on. Properly used, they will make your writing flow and make your text easier to read. You can't do well in CAE without using these phrases.

Here's a page with some ideas about cohesive devices - try to include them in your writing. Here's another one with tips for the IELTS exam.

7. Grading: Language

Organising a text, using linking words, and getting all the content points is a great start, but for a high grade you'll need to use advanced vocabulary and more difficult sentence structures.

In the planning stage of the exam think about which high-level words you know for that topic and think in which paragraph you can use them. For example, if the topic is about transport you might use phrases like 'mass transit system', 'to commute', 'congestion,' and 'pressed for time'.

Then you need to use a variety of structures - passives, inversions, cleft sentences, questions, sentences with semi-colons. The more variety the better!

Also a variety of sentence lengths. This picture explains what I mean:

So instead of writing like this:
A lot of politicians say they will improve bus and train services. Having trains is good for people who have to go to work. It means they don't have to take the car to work. It is probably faster. If everyone takes a train to work there won't be any traffic jams.
You can produce this:
Why do progressive politicians pledge to provide mass transit systems in their cities? The answer is clear: Not only do pressed-for-time commuters benefit, but there is also less pollution. Let congestion be a thing of the past; let flowers bloom next to every tram stop.
In those three sentences there is one question; one colon; one semi-colon; one 'not only but also'; one imperative. Not bad, right? You can write like this if you practice and if you're not afraid to make some mistakes along the way.

8. How to write a CAE essay/letter/report/proposal

Essays

9. Our Videos about CAE Writing

10. Common Mistakes in CAE Writing

Grammar Mistakes

Most CAE students don't make obvious, basic mistakes like your/you're or its/it's. But they do struggle with things like:
Relative clauses
You need to learn the difference between defining and non-defining relative clauses. Your non-defining clauses need commas, while your defining clauses shouldn't have commas.

I had lunch with my grandfather, who is 90 years old. (The second half of the sentence tells you more about my grandfather. It's bonus information, so there has to be a comma.)

I had lunch with my friend who lives in Prague. (I am very cool and popular - I have lots of friends. If I say 'I had lunch with my friend' you don't know which friend I mean. So the 'who lives in Prague' clause gives you essential information. Therefore, no comma!)

Note that non-defining pronouns cannot be changed to 'that', so you should never write a comma followed by 'that'. (This is especially a problem for German speakers because in German you HAVE to use a comma before 'that'.)
Gerund vs infinitive
Gerund means the -ing form of a verb. This is a tricky part of grammar because there are no rules and you have to learn every verb one by one. English! Argh! Anyway, make sure you know these structures:

I used to live in China (= I lived in China).

I'm used to hear ing German (= hearing German is normal for me).

I look forward to meet ing you.

I stopped smok ing (= I quit).

I stopped to smoke (= I stopped what I was doing because I wanted to have a cigarette).

I recommend buy ing new computer equipment. (Suggest and advise are also followed by gerunds.)

I recommend you buy new computer equipment.

Prepositions
So hard! So many prepositions! So many mistakes! Just learn as many as you can and remember, every single student who has ever taken the CAE exam has struggled with prepositions. You are not alone!
Conditionals
If I get the job I will move to Zurich. (The speaker is confident.)

If I got the job I would move to Zurich. (The speaker is not confident.)

If I had got the job I would have moved to Zurich. (But the speaker didn't get the job and didn't move to Zurich.)

Other Mistakes
Not taking risks
A lot of students always write the same, safe, things they always write. To master advanced vocabulary and structures you have to use advanced vocabulary and structures!
Being boring
It's hard enough to produce a well-structured piece of writing with good vocabulary that fits the content. But remember that the examiners read hundreds and hundreds of essays and most of them are very boring! If you make yours interesting (though the style, unexpectedly good vocabulary, maybe even a joke or two) the examiners will be VERY happy and you will be REWARDED.

11. Writing Correction Online

Students often ask if I offer a writing correction service. Well... to be honest I'm not very motivated to do that right now. You should find a teacher on italki instead. Click here to read about italki. (Watch the video with David to hear more about writing correction.)

12. Frequently Asked Questions

Q - Do I have to use British spelling?

A - No, it doesn't matter. But if you use American spelling, be consistent throughout your writing.

Q - How important is spelling and punctuation?

A - It's pretty important - If you make a trivial mistake it won't be a big deal. If the mistake stops the reader from understanding what you mean then you will lose points.

Q - How important is the word count? What happens if I write too many words?

A - The word count is a guide, not a rule. But if you do the task properly you will write about 220-260 words. If you write 300 words then you've probably written lots of stuff you don't need. If you write 200 words you've probably forgotten something.

DO NOT waste time in the exam counting how many words you have written! And never add or remove words just because of the word count - it'll turn out clumsy and weird.

All that said, when you are practicing for the writing section, I recommend you stick to the suggested word count.

Note that the computer-based exam will automatically count how many words you're using. Handy! See this article for more information about the computer-based CAE exam.

Q - I know I need to use complex sentences to get a good grade, but I'm worried about making mistakes. Is it better to have a simple text with no mistakes?

A - Cambridge says that students who make mistakes while trying to use complex structures will get credit for trying (as long as the mistake doesn't stop the reader from understanding).

Q - My handwriting is terrible! No-one can read it! Will I lose points?

A - No. Your handwriting is not very important. Just make sure it can be read. Also, you don't need to rewrite your text (and you don't have time to rewrite it) - if it's got lots of bits crossed out, don't worry. Every student's writing looks the same!

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CAE Writing Test Tips - Guaranteed to Improve Your Exam Score - CAE Exam Tips

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You have 90 minutes to write two texts. Each text should be about 220-260 words long (see the Questions section at the bottom if you have concerns about the word count). Part 1 is always an essay, while in part 2 you have a choice of 3 tasks (letter/email; proposal; report; review).

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A very nice teacher has put together a lot of detailed tips on how to pass CAE

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What do you enjoy most about learning English?

ANSWER 1

Well, there are two answers:

The first is that I enjoy the English language itself. I just like the way it sounds, I've always liked it since I was a child.

The second answer is that English is the modern lingua franca, that is, I can talk to everybody in the world. No language barrier between me and somebody from China or Saudi Arabia or Sweden!

Marina, Italy

ANSWER 2

For me, next to the use of the English language, the culture and the literature is really what I like studying a language. But the most important reason why I learn languages, mostly English and Spanish, is the reason to be able to communicate with people around the world.

F., Switzerland

ANSWER 3

Since we live in a globalized world with English as the most spoken language, learning it enables me to make friends from every corner of the world, which definitely is the part I enjoy the most.

Hana, Slovakia

ANSWER 4

Being able to communicate with foreigners - travelling and meeting new people is easier!

Beatka, Spain

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Speaking Test Part 1 - Common Questions and Sample Answers - CAE Exam Tips

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Just the best list of CAE Speaking Test part 1 questions. With answers from students around the world. AND feedback from me. No big deal. The usual.

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Pip is a rapper-turned-podcaster-actor and absolutely everyone wants to be on his podcast. Expect deep and meaningful conversations.

Recommended episodes from 2019 so far: Johann Hari, PC Leon McLeod.

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Distraction Pieces Podcast - Archive 2019 - SPEECH DEVELOPMENT RECORDS

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Expand your range and accuracy of collocations to improve your writings

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Meet Gen Z, your future co-workers

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Gen Z Is Coming to Your Office. Get Ready to Adapt.

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The generation now entering the workforce is sober, industrious and driven by money. They are also socially awkward and timid about taking the reins.

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"It is the responsibility of all of us to get to know our weaknesses and make sure they don't become weapons."

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Yuval Noah Harari: Why fascism is so tempting -- and how your data could power it

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In a profound talk about technology and power, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari explains the important difference between fascism and nationalism -- and what the consolidation of our data means for the future of democracy.

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The original groundbreaking expose of Cambridge Analytics

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The original groundbreaking expose of Cambridge Analytics

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Not new but still worth reading when you have the time.

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The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump's election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant's biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the how Cambridge Analytica - a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump's key adviser Steve Bannon - used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: "We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles. 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."

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

Profile
Cambridge Analytica: the key players

Alexander Nix, CEO
An Old Etonian with a degree from Manchester University, Nix, 42, worked as a financial analyst in Mexico and the UK before joining SCL, a strategic communications firm, in 2003. From 2007 he took over the company's elections division, and claims to have worked on 260 campaigns globally. He set up Cambridge Analytica to work in America, with investment from Robert Mercer.
Aleksandr Kogan, data miner
Aleksandr Kogan was born in Moldova and lived in Moscow until the age of seven, then moved with his family to the US, where he became a naturalised citizen. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and got his PhD at the University of Hong Kong before joining Cambridge as a lecturer in psychology and expert in social media psychometrics. He set up Global Science Research (GSR) to carry out CA's data research. While at Cambridge he accepted a position at St Petersburg State University, and also took Russian government grants for research. He changed his name to Spectre when he married, but later reverted to Kogan.
Steve Bannon, former board member
A former investment banker turned "alt-right" media svengali, Steve Bannon was boss at website Breitbart when he met Christopher Wylie and Nix and advised Robert Mercer to invest in political data research by setting up CA. In August 2016 he became Donald Trump's campaign CEO. Bannon encouraged the reality TV star to embrace the "populist, economic nationalist" agenda that would carry him into the White House. That earned Bannon the post of chief strategist to the president and for a while he was arguably the second most powerful man in America. By August 2017 his relationship with Trump had soured and he was out.

Robert Mercer, investor
Robert Mercer, 71, is a computer scientist and hedge fund billionaire, who used his fortune to become one of the most influential men in US politics as a top Republican donor. An AI expert, he made a fortune with quantitative trading pioneers Renaissance Technologies, then built a $60m war chest to back conservative causes by using an offshore investment vehicle to avoid US tax.

Rebekah Mercer, investor
Rebekah Mercer has a maths degree from Stanford, and worked as a trader, but her influence comes primarily from her father's billions. The fortysomething, the second of Mercer's three daughters, heads up the family foundation which channels money to rightwing groups. The conservative mega‑donors backed Breitbart, Bannon and, most influentially, poured millions into Trump's presidential campaign.

Thank you for your feedback.

The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.

The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands ofusers were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.

However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers' Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook's "platform policy" allowed only collection of friends' data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook's role in targeting voters in the US presidential election. It comes only weeks after indictments of 13 Russians by the special counsel Robert Mueller which stated they had used the platform to perpetrate "information warfare" against the US.

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are one focus of an inquiry into data and politics by the British Information Commissioner's Office. Separately, the Electoral Commission is also investigating what role Cambridge Analytica played in the EU referendum.

"We are investigating the circumstances in which Facebook data may have been illegally acquired and used," said the information commissioner Elizabeth Denham. "It's part of our ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes which was launched to consider how political parties and campaigns, data analytics companies and social media platforms in the UK are using and analysing people's personal information to micro-target voters."

On Friday, four days after the Observer sought comment for this story, but more than two years after the data breach was first reported, Facebook announced that it was suspending Cambridge Analytica and Kogan from the platform, pending further information over misuse of data. Separately, Facebook's external lawyers warned the Observer it was making "false and defamatory" allegations, and reserved Facebook's legal position.

Key Trump adviser Steve Bannon Photograph: Alain Robert/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock

The revelations provoked widespread outrage. The Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey announced that the state would be launching an investigation. "Residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica," she said on Twitter.

The Democratic senator Mark Warner said the harvesting of data on such a vast scale for political targeting underlined the need for Congress to improve controls. He has proposed an Honest Ads Act to regulate online political advertising the same way as television, radio and print. "This story is more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West. Whether it's allowing Russians to purchase political ads, or extensive micro-targeting based on ill-gotten user data, it's clear that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency," he said.

Last month both Facebook and the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, told a parliamentary inquiry on fake news: that the company did not have or use private Facebook data.

Simon Milner, Facebook's UK policy director, when asked if Cambridge Analytica had Facebook data, told MPs: "They may have lots of data but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided."

Cambridge Analytica's chief executive, Alexander Nix, told the inquiry: "We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data."

Wylie, a Canadian data analytics expert who worked with Cambridge Analytica and Kogan to devise and implement the scheme, showed a dossier of evidence about the data misuse to the Observer which appears to raise questions about their testimony. He has passed it to the National Crime Agency's cybercrime unit and the Information Commissioner's Office. It includes emails, invoices, contracts and bank transfers that reveal more than 50 million profiles - mostly belonging to registered US voters - were harvested from the site in one of the largest-ever breaches of Facebook data. Facebook on Friday said that it was also suspending Wylie from accessing the platform while it carried out its investigation, despite his role as a whistleblower.

At the time of the data breach, Wylie was a Cambridge Analytica employee, but Facebook described him as working for Eunoia Technologies, a firm he set up on his own after leaving his former employer in late 2014.

The evidence Wylie supplied to UK and US authorities includes a letter from Facebook's own lawyers sent to him in August 2016, asking him to destroy any data he held that had been collected by GSR, the company set up by Kogan to harvest the profiles.

That legal letter was sent several months after the Guardian first reported the breach and days before it was officially announced that Bannon was taking over as campaign manager for Trump and bringing Cambridge Analytica with him.

"Because this data was obtained and used without permission, and because GSR was not authorised to share or sell it to you, it cannot be used legitimately in the future and must be deleted immediately," the letter said.

Facebook did not pursue a response when the letter initially went unanswered for weeks because Wylie was travelling, nor did it follow up with forensic checks on his computers or storage, he said.

"That to me was the most astonishing thing. They waited two years and did absolutely nothing to check that the data was deleted. All they asked me to do was tick a box on a form and post it back."

Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a data protection specialist, who spearheaded the investigative efforts into the tech giant, said: "Facebook has denied and denied and denied this. It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it's failed in its duties to respect the law.

"It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn't. It's failed time and time again to be open and transparent."

We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of profiles. And built models to exploit that and target their inner demons

Christopher Wylie

A majority of American states have laws requiring notification in some cases of data breach, including California, where Facebook is based.

Facebook denies that the harvesting of tens of millions of profiles by GSR and Cambridge Analytica was a data breach. It said in a statement that Kogan "gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels" but "did not subsequently abide by our rules" because he passed the information on to third parties.

Facebook said it removed the app in 2015 and required certification from everyone with copies that the data had been destroyed, although the letter to Wylie did not arrive until the second half of 2016. "We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information. We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens," Paul Grewal, Facebook's vice-president, said in a statement. The company is now investigating reports that not all data had been deleted.

Kogan, who has previously unreported links to a Russian university and took Russian grants for research, had a licence from Facebook to collect profile data, but it was for research purposes only. So when he hoovered up information for the commercial venture, he was violating the company's terms. Kogan maintains everything he did was legal, and says he had a "close working relationship" with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps.

Quick Guide
How the Cambridge Analytica story unfolded

In December 2016, while researching the US presidential election, Carole Cadwalladr came across data analytics company Cambridge Analytica, whose secretive manner and chequered track record belied its bland, academic-sounding name.

Her initial investigations uncovered the role of US billionaire Robert Mercer in the US election campaign: his strategic "war" on mainstream media and his political campaign funding, some apparently linked to Brexit.

She found the first indications that Cambridge Analytica might have used data processing methods that breached the Data Protection Act. That article prompted Britain's Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner's Office to launch investigations whose remits include Cambridge Analytica's use of data and its possible links to the EU referendum. These investigations are continuing, as is a wider ICO inquiry into the use of data in politics.

While chasing the details and ramifications of complex manipulation of both data and funding law, Cadwalladr came under increasing attacks, both online and professionally, from key players.

The Leave.EU campaign tweeted a doctored video that showed her being violently assaulted, and the Russian embassy wrote to the Observer to complain that her reporting was a "textbook example of bad journalism".

But the growing profile of her reports also gave whistleblowers confidence that they could trust her to not only understand their stories, but retell them clearly for a wide audience.

Her network of sources and contacts grew to include not only former employees who regretted their work but academics, lawyers and others concerned about the impact on democracy of tactics employed by Cambridge Analytica and associates.

Cambridge Analytica is now the subject of special prosecutor Robert Mueller's probing of the company's role in Donald Trump's presidential election campaign. Investigations in the UK remain live.

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The Observer has seen a contract dated 4 June 2014, which confirms SCL, an affiliate of Cambridge Analytica, entered into a commercial arrangement with GSR, entirely premised on harvesting and processing Facebook data. Cambridge Analytica spent nearly $1m on data collection, which yielded more than 50 million individual profiles that could be matched to electoral rolls. It then used the test results and Facebook data to build an algorithm that could analyse individual Facebook profiles and determine personality traits linked to voting behaviour.

The algorithm and database together made a powerful political tool. It allowed a campaign to identify possible swing voters and craft messages more likely to resonate.

"The ultimate product of the training set is creating a 'gold standard' of understanding personality from Facebook profile information," the contract specifies. It promises to create a database of 2 million "matched" profiles, identifiable and tied to electoral registers, across 11 states, but with room to expand much further.

At the time, more than 50 million profiles represented around a third of active North American Facebook users, and nearly a quarter of potential US voters. Yet when asked by MPs if any of his firm's data had come from GSR, Nix said: "We had a relationship with GSR. They did some research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the answer is no."

Cambridge Analytica said that its contract with GSR stipulated that Kogan should seek informed consent for data collection and it had no reason to believe he would not.

GSR was "led by a seemingly reputable academic at an internationally renowned institution who made explicit contractual commitments to us regarding its legal authority to license data to SCL Elections", a company spokesman said.

SCL Elections, an affiliate, worked with Facebook over the period to ensure it was satisfied no terms had been "knowingly breached" and provided a signed statement that all data and derivatives had been deleted, he said. Cambridge Analytica also said none of the data was used in the 2016 presidential election.

Steve Bannon's lawyer said he had no comment because his client "knows nothing about the claims being asserted". He added: "The first Mr Bannon heard of these reports was from media inquiries in the past few days." He directed inquires to Nix.

The Observer

The Observer is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, founded in 1791. It is published by Guardian News & Media and is editorially independent.

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Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

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