This will rock your world
IF the new feature documentary The Great Hack doesn’t make you consider immediately deleting every social media account you have, you probably weren’t paying enough attention.
This Netflix original film, released globally on July 24, takes an in-depth look at the Cambridge Analytica scandal, shining a very public light on the terrifying truth behind data-mining.
In the wake of the US presidential election in 2016 and the historic Brexit referendum in the UK the same year, a sinister conspiracy emerged that was almost too Machiavellian to believe.
In the investigations and government hearings that followed the election of Donald Trump as president, and the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, two company names kept appearing: Facebook and a consultancy called Cambridge Analytica.
It transpired that in both of these landmark political events, James Bond movies or the wildest online conspiracy theories — except this was real.
In the case of the US, they were able to accurately predict the voting tendencies of the entire American voting population and isolate the regions and individuals who is harvested constantly by virtually every single action we take in our daily lives, from swiping a credit card or a bus pass, to simply clicking the like button on Instagram.
Carroll’s mission is to force Cambridge Analytica to hand over its file on him, so he can the whistle on her role in the scandal.
Filmmakers Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer previously made the Oscarnominated 2013 documentary The Square, which followed the “Arab Spring” political uprising in Egypt, largely enabled by the psychological manipulation and demographic targeting.
But what makes the Cambridge Analytica scandal so insidious is the sheer scale of the data harvesting that took place, and the terrifying way these organisations and campaigns were able to accurate personality profiles and prediction algorithms of every one of us.
Kaiser refers to it as “weaponised data”, a term not nearly as over-the-top as it might seem. The narrative of the documentary is sometimes a bit fractured and, unless you