By Lauren Fruen For Dailymail.com
Published: 13:32 GMT, 16 March 2019 | Updated: 13:32 GMT, 16 March 2019
View
comments
The university academic at the center of the Cambridge Analytica data mining scandal is suing Mark Zuckerberg for defamation after claiming Facebook used him as a 'scapegoat'.
Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan was behind an app that helped to harvest data from up to 87 million Facebook users.
He is taking social media founder Zuckerberg to court after the company said that he had lied about how the data was going to be used.
Zuckerberg and other executives have said Kogan told them the data was for academic purposes not political campaigns.
But Kogan's lawyer, Steve Cohen, said: 'Alex did not lie, Alex was not a fraud, Alex did not deceive them, this was not a scam.
'Facebook knew exactly what this app was doing, or should have known. Facebook desperately needed a scapegoat, and Alex was their scapegoat.'
Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, left, has blamed Aleksandr Kogan, right, for misusing data, while he claims they have used him as a scapegoat
Facebook has been embroiled in scandal since revelations that data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica misused personal information from as many as 87 million Facebook accounts.
Cambridge Analytica was founded by wealthy Republican donor Robert Mercer and Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
It received the data from a Facebook personality-quiz app that former psychology professor Kogan, 32, created. That app collected data on both users
