Did internet spies really put Trump in power?

The Great Hack (15) Verdict: Fascinating but flawed ★★★✩✩

THERE is a transparent political agenda behind this Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytica furore, and the secretive use of masses of personal data, largely obtained through Facebook and other social media outfits, to enable targeted electioneering. Or propaganda, if you prefer.

The film’s strong implication is that data-mining — deeply unethical but not necessarily illegal — is a sinister instrument used by the Machiavellian Right to gain an advantage over the liberal Left.

Yet filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim touch only fleetingly on the fact that Barack Obama was carried into the White House partly on the back of data-mining.

Their targets are those whose seemingly devious machinations led to the Brexit vote and the electoral success of Donald Trump.

If Brexit and Trump had both been defeated, with their opponents gaining an upper hand through their own deployment of personal data, would this documentary have been made?

Almost certainly not, given that it relies to a significant extent on reporting by the Guardian newspaper.

Still, none of this means it isn’t an extremely watchable film, albeit deeply flawed.

And it certainly shows how anxious we should all be about the way our online habits expose us, without our knowledge, to social, political and psychological profiling.

If there is a villain of the piece, it is probably Alexander Nix, the urbane British boss of Cambridge Analytica (and a dead cert to be played by Tom Hiddleston when the feature film gets made, as surely it will), the decidedly shady company which colluded with Facebook in handing the data to political campaign teams.

But the person who emerges with least credit from The Great Hack is Brittany Kaiser, the limelight-loving former Cambridge Analytica employee who fancied herself a whistleblower.

The film relies too much on her testimony, joining her in a taxi as she ‘frantically’ searches for her passport and then, squirting perfume, says ‘at least I smell good’.

She doesn’t, actually. The sour whiff of self-promotion and self-satisfaction follows her everywhere.