Remember those seemingly innocent Facebook quizzes that you took to determine what Disney villain you were, or whether you were an introvert or any other goofy question you couldn’t wait to have answered so you could share it with friends online? Those little diversions asked specific questions that were used to harvest data. Carroll’s lawsuit is an attempt to retrieve the data collected on him.Īnd how did the thousands of points of data wind up in those databases? Well, you willingly gave it to them, dear readers. The master manipulators didn’t go after people whose minds had been made up they went after on-the-fence folks referred to as “the persuadables.” Using the collected data, Cambridge Analytica set out to create fear and/or apathy to achieve the results of the political parties that hired them. This information was used for a variety of purposes meant to manipulate a certain cross-section of people. At the height of its powers, the company held up to 5,000 data points about each of the people contained in its databases. The common factor in all these events is a now-defunct firm called Cambridge Analytica, represented throughout the film by several former employees. “The Great Hack” concerns itself with the United States Presidential election of 2016 and, to a lesser extent, the Brexit vote and other international political campaigns. It was only a matter of time before someone applied this to politics and elections. Facebook and Twitter have so easily exploited this notion in the culture that the term “fear of missing out” was coined to describe it. Here, social media becomes the new Petri dish, enticing users with hot trends and ideas that demanded immediate consumption and acceptance lest the user risk being left behind. “The Great Hack” blends in details about how the many strides in computer technology and data analysis now allow a massive, global expansion of a new type of social experiment, one that involves reshaping the world in a particular image. Their narrator is David Carroll, a media professor whose international lawsuit serves as the jumping off point. Directors Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim keep this revelation running under the surface of their film.
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