Dr Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge academic at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, has told a parliamentary committee that he has been wrongly painted as a “rogue agent” and that Cambridge Analytica benefitted little from his work, contrary to claims in the media and by Facebook.

An investigation by The New York Times, The Guardian/Observer and Channel 4 alleged that the psychology lecturer’s company, Global Science Research (GSR) used a Facebook app to harvest data on 50 million Facebook users and passed this data to SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. According to the investigation, this data was used by Cambridge Analytica to precisely target users with ads that would make them more likely to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

Soon after the investigation was published, Facebook banned Kogan from the platform, claiming that he “lied to us and violated our platform policies”. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously told the US Congress that the company would be looking into the possibility of “something bad going on in Cambridge University”. He said the company had “found now” that there was a “whole programme” of Cambridge researchers using social media data to produce psychological profiles based on user actions, referring here to the Psychometrics Centre, with which Kogan was involved.

Kogan, however, told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that “it’s convenient [for Facebook] to point the finger at a single entity and try to paint the picture this is a rogue agent”. He claimed that this is the company being in “PR crisis mode” as it is aware that the platform “has been mined left and right by thousands of others”.

GSR paid 270,000 individuals to take a personality survey on its Facebook app, thisisyourdigitallife, and give the app permission to access some of their Facebook data. The app also took data from the Facebook friends of those who took the survey, meaning that it was able to gather data on far more people - most of whom had not explicitly consented. Despite some media outlets calling this a “hack”, Kogan said that this was “this was not a trick, this was a core feature [of Facebook] at the time”. Facebook has said that this functionality was not against the rules of the platform at the time, but that the rules have since changed.

Facebook claims that the reason why it banned Kogan is that he broke their developers’ policy, which prohibits app developers from passing on information obtained from Facebook apps to third parties. This is what GSR appears to have done with SCL/Cambridge Analytica.

Kogan rejected this characterisation, however, stating that “for you to break a policy, it has to exist… the reality is that Facebook’s policy is unlikely to be their policy”. He has previously told CBS News that “the belief in Silicon Valley... was that the general public must be aware that their data is being sold and shared and used to advertise to them.” He also told the MPs that Joseph Chancellor, his former co-director of GSR, with whom he collaborated for the app, is now working for Facebook, without any penalty. Facebook has previously said that Chancellor’s prior work is “not relevant”.

Kogan did concede, however, that GSR’s “actions were inconsistent with the language of this document”. Paul Farrelly MP, who was questioning him at the time, joked in response that “you should be a professor of semantics”.

Kogan also downplayed in the meeting the ability of the data passed from GSR to SCL to influence the presidential election.

He argued that if SCL had wanted to target ads to American voters with specific personalities, they should have done so using Facebook’s own ad tools, rather than the data from GSR. He noted that Facebook’s “lookalike audience” feature lets advertisers give Facebook a small number of email addresses of users from a specific demographic and have the company show ads to other similar users.

Kogan said that this would have been far easier, as SCL would have needed detailed data on only a few thousand Facebook users, as opposed to millions. He also said that this would have led to more accurate targeting of individuals in a specific demographic, as Facebook uses more types of data to construct this ‘lookalike audience’ than SCL had.

He said that it was “incompetent [for SCL] to do it this way” and a “waste of time”. He claimed that he wasn’t aware at the time of what the purpose of the data was, and so did not point this out.

Kogan added that it was unlikely that GRS data was used for political campaigning in the UK’s EU referendum. He said that as the data was collected only on people who claimed to live in the USA, it would likely not have been useful.

At the end of the meeting, Kogan was asked about his connection to the University of St Petersburg and a project there that used data to analyse how to stop cyberbullying. The Committee’s chair, Damian Collins MP, suggested that this research might be into “how to do it, rather than how to stop it”, in order to serve the Russian government.

Kogan showed doubt for this idea, saying that the University only receives a block grant from the Russian government, and then chooses itself what to research. He added that “you could make the same argument about the UK government funding anything, and the US government funding anything”.

He also downplayed his links to the research, saying there were only “one or two meetings”, where he “gave them a bit of advice”, although his name was on the original grant application for the project.

Several media outlets have previously drawn attention to the Russia link to question whether Kogan is a Russian spy. It is perhaps for this reason that Kogan was asked whether he knew that “Spectre”, the new surname that he and his wife chose to adopt after marrying, was “the name of the evil organisation in the Bond films”. Kogan called it “an unfortunate coincidence”.