Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Great Hack’ On Netflix, A Documentary About How Cambridge Analytica Mined Our Personal Data And Who Blew The Whistle

The case of how Cambridge Analytica influenced the 2016 presidential election using Facebook data, and how they held the data after telling Mark Zuckerberg that they deleted it, is complicated and not well understood by most people not in the data science field. The new film The Great Hack tries to explain what they did and their role in layman’s terms, as well as profile the main whistleblower, a conflicted young woman who still isn’t 100% sure the company did anything wrong. Read on for more…

THE GREAT HACK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: When the story about Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook users’ personal data — and the data of their friends — to help target videos and posts that played a big part in convincing the “persuadables,” in their words, to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. The Great Hack discusses CA’s role, how much data they actually was able to mine from things as simple as personalty quizzes, and just how truly pervasive the use of online personal data to target a particular message to a set of users is.

The documentary, directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim (Control Room) focuses the scandal on its major player, namely CA’s CEO Alexander Nix (who refused to be interviewed), Parsons School of Design professor David Carroll, who sued CA to see the data on him that they had, which opened up CA’s data-gathering methods to legal scrutiny, and Brittany Kaiser, a CA executive who became the biggest whistleblower against the company.

There are other players interviewed, as well, such as Guardian reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who blew the lid off CA’s data gathering and how they used it, as well as Chris Wylie, the initial whistleblower who started the entire ball rolling right after the 2016 election.

One of the more remarkable revelations in the movie is that people like Kaiser, who was so enthusiastic about the data they gathered to help the “Leave” party win in the Brexit election in the UK (though CA denies they worked with the Leave.EU campaign aside from an initial pitch), had no problem working with the Ted Cruz and Trump campaigns despite being an idealistic, left-leaning, human rights advocate. What motivated her to go to work for Nix when many of the candidates they were working with stood against everything she stood for?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Great Hack has shades of the recent HBO documentary The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley, though what CA and Nix did wasn’t fake it all; in fact, it was way more scary than anything Elizabeth Holmes ever did with her fake blood tests.

Performance Worth Watching: Brittany Kaiser becomes the center of this film about a quarter of the way in; as CA’s program development director, she worked closely with Nix and other top execs in the company to implement the data mining and manipulation protocols that influenced the 2016 election. We see her first in Thailand in an infinity pool, trying to lay low right after she left CA, but, along with writer Paul Hilder, we see how conflicted she is about the whole thing. She doesn’t want to admit that she led the efforts to mine the data from Facebook, and not delete it when Mark Zuckerberg asked them to, but also seems to be horrified in retrospect at what all this meant.

Memorable Dialogue: Carroll on Kaiser: “Seems like Kaiser has some moral compass in her, but so many times she knew she was in a dark world and didn’t step away.”

Our Take: It’s tough to describe in this review the depths to which Cambridge Analytica used the data they mined to create psychological profiles of every US voter, as well as what they were able to do with it via manipulative videos, social media “fake news” campaigns, and other viral methods. Lots of the “Crooked Hillary” videos distributed throughout the campaign were at least targeted using CA’s data, if not created by CA outright.

Amer and Noujaim lay out a chilling case, especially with Carroll as the representative of an everyday person who just wants to know what info CA has on him, concerning how many data points companies like CA have on each and every one of us. If we’re not careful, as Cadwalladr points out, we’ll never have a free and fair election again.

It does feel, though, like the filmmakers give Kaiser a bit too much of a pass; yes, Carroll and others call her out for not acknowledging her part in these initiatives, but it feels like she gets more sympathy than she might deserve. Yes, she took a job with Nix and CA, despite the fact that who they associated with were folks she never aligned herself with in her life, because she was intrigued about what they were doing and needed a well-paying job. But she also stayed once they realized what the company’s goals really were. She made a deal with the devil, and now that she was exposing what the devil was up to, it doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t acknowledge her part in it. She makes an unsuccessful case that the scrutiny she was under was unfair; it looks more like the dissembling of someone who can’t wrap their minds around the gravity of what they had just done.

It also seems to gloss over Steve Bannon’s connection to the company; by the time he joined the Trump campaign, he was heavily invested in the company and helped create the models they used to target videos and posts to the “persuadables.” The fact that Bannon joined the campaign at the precise time it needed a boost is more than a coincidence, but the film doesn’t really look into it.

Facebook also gets the proverbial slap on the wrist in this film. We see Zuck’s dead-eyed testimony in front of a congressional committee where he says the company had no knowledge that CA was holding data they said they deleted, but the filmmakers don’t look critically enough at just what FB’s role in this really was. They decided to leave it at what Zuck said, that they were asleep at the wheel, and they never intended for their data to be manipulated in this way, but that all feels like bullshit. And while Carroll, Kaiser and Cadwalladr call them out on that, there isn’t much of an in-depth look at their role.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Great Hack may not give you the satisfaction you might be looking for after how the 2016 election went, but it will likely make you think critically about just what information you allow online and who you’re giving it to.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream The Great Hack on Netflix