In the video, Mr. Nix, sitting in a hotel bar, suggested ideas for a prospective client looking for help in a foreign election. The firm could send an attractive woman to seduce a rival candidate and secretly videotape the encounter, Mr. Nix said, or send someone posing as a wealthy land developer to pass a bribe.
“We have a long history of working behind the scenes,” Mr. Nix said.
The prospective client, though, was actually a reporter from Channel 4 News in Britain, and the encounter was secretly filmed as part of a monthslong investigation into Cambridge Analytica.
The results of Channel 4’s work were broadcast in Britain on Monday, days after reports in The New York Times and The Observer of London that the firm had harvested the data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles in its bid to develop techniques for predicting voter behavior.
On Tuesday, Damian Collins, the chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee of the House of Commons, called on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to give evidence in the British Parliament.
In a letter, Mr. Collins said that previous answers from Facebook officials about the misuse of data had been “misleading” to the committee.
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“It is now time to hear from a senior Facebook executive with the sufficient authority to give an accurate account of this catastrophic failure of process,” the letter said, adding, “I hope that this representative will be you.”
In the United States on Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced an investigation into whether Facebook violated an agreement on data privacy in the episode. At least two American state prosecutors have also said they are looking into the misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica.
Announcing the chief executive’s suspension, the company said in a statement that “in the view of the board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation.”
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The company said it had asked Alexander Tayler, its chief data officer, “to serve as acting C.E.O. while an independent investigation is launched to review those comments and allegations.”
The company also said it had hired a lawyer, Julian Malins, “to lead this investigation, the findings of which the board will share publicly in due course.”
It added: “The board will be monitoring the situation closely, working closely with Dr. Tayler, to ensure that Cambridge Analytica, in all of its operations, represents the firm’s values and delivers the highest-quality service to its clients.”
Mr. Tayler trained as a chemical engineer and joined Cambridge Analytica in 2014 as its lead data scientist, according to his LinkedIn profile. Mr. Malins is a seasoned corporate lawyer who has worked on complex litigation, with an expertise in asset recovery and money laundering cases.
Some observers thought the suspension of Mr. Nix was at most a first step.
“If they think ‘suspending’ a chief executive even approaches proportionality for this kind of mass data breach, they underestimate people institutions who will fight for #privacy rights for Facebook to account for their actions,” Claude Moraes, a Labour Party official who represents London in the European Parliament, wrote on Twitter.
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