News happens even when you're trying to chill
Intuition led me to keep digging ... And there it was, right at the bottom
On Sunday morning, I was indulging in the innocent version of “Netflix and Chill”.
The first weekend off since Christmas and the bank account giving Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard a serious run for its money, there was no more appropriate time to catch up on movies and series that might have been missed in 2019. With a proclivity for documentaries, I stumbled across one called The Great Hack — an examination of disgraced political consultancy Cambridge Analytica and its role in influencing the 2016 US elections and Brexit.
The scandal was well-known, of course. Revelations about the company’s data-mining of Facebook to target potential voters for Donald Trump dominated news cycles for weeks on end in early 2018. At one point, there were 37,000 articles a day about Cambridge Analytica and its dark arts.
Still, the documentary provided information previously unknown to me, and I was eager to learn more.
One of the great lessons I learnt in my early days of journalism was that every story can be localised, or made relevant to local audiences. That is initially what prompted me to google “Cambridge Analytica SA”.
The returned answers were expected — Facebook confirming 60,000 South African accounts were affected in the company’s hack, a review of the film I had been watching and a few articles about privacy protection.
But then I noticed that the UK’s Guardian had recently published a piece about a huge document dump, one that showed the inner workings of the Cambridge Analytica machine at the peak of its powers.
The newspaper spoke of an anonymous Twitter account that was leaking e-mails, international communications, prospectuses, pitch letters and more onto the world.
I am not a big one for Twitter but I still keep my account open, and so the handle @HindSightFiles was easy enough to find.
Zip files relating to several countries were available to download, but I zeroed in on Kenya and Ghana because I had read of Cambridge Analytica having a hand in those two African states.
Now there was absolutely no reason to say that SA should be featured in any of these documents. Yes, our nation had endured the Bell Pottinger saga, but as far as interactions with these two nations’ elections is concerned, there simply wasn’t any cause to do so.
The documents were interesting, that much is certain.
The clandestine language between company executives read like a spy novel, but I was also taken by how easily the company managed to convince leaders of foreign governments to secure their services.
Call it a journalist’s intuition (that will probably be considered an oxymoron in many circles), but I kept on reading, suspecting there might, might, be something in these pages for Dispatch readers, even if it came in the form of a Saturday feature.
And there it was, right at the bottom of a chain mail. A 2016 e-mail from one company executive advising that the 2019 SA elections were “definitely on my radar”.
It was hardly even a sentence, more like a bullet point than anything else, but here was the smoking gun that proved our country was in the crosshairs of one of the most controversial companies in modern history.
By no means were we alone in the world, but in light of Bell Pottinger, we had as much reason as any to be on our guard.
I wrote the article then and there, weekend off or not. Some things can’t wait, and this was definitely one of them. People needed to know.
The story was published by the Dispatch and picked up by TimesLIVE, which forms part of our media group, before other publications followed suit.
I will vouch for Netflix documentaries any day of the week.