“We saw first-hand how this technology was this incredible tool for change,” says Noujaim. Noujaim was filming and Amer was organising, but they ended up working together on the film that became The Square. The couple met in Egypt’s Tahrir Square during the months-long protest in 2011. But it springs from the unlikeliest of places: the techno-optimism of the Arab spring, the revolutions that were widely greeted as proving the liberating effects of this new technology. But what the film tries to do through creative and unusual graphics is to make the invisible visible: pixels representing data bytes float off Carroll as he rides the subway – the informational exhaust fumes we give off, hundreds of thousands of data points every day, which are hoovered up and monetised by the tech monopoly giants in ways we can’t see or understand.Įxposing this invisible world of manipulation and power is one of the principal aims of the film, according to Amer and Noujaim. The data swamp remains dark, toxic and invisible. All we know is that both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent the facts coming out. Or what it did in any of the dozens of elections worldwide it claimed to have worked on – what Carroll calls “subversion on an industrial scale”. We still have no clear picture what Cambridge Analytica did for Trump. Who was targeted? With what ads? In what locations? Carroll knows nothing about the nature of the 5,000 data points the firm claimed, in its own marketing, to have on 230 million American voters, including himself. We still know very little about what the company actually did with the data. Because although he proved that the firm had illegally processed his data, ultimately his attempt to retrieve that data was thwarted by Cambridge Analytica’s decision to liquidate.Ĭarroll’s experience is just one of the many unknowns that still surround this story. Here, they tell the story via the personal journeys of two contrasting individuals: David Carroll, a New York media professor who attempts a circuitous, difficult and ultimately unsuccessful journey via the English legal system to find out what data Cambridge Analytica held on him and Brittany Kaiser, an ex-employee of Cambridge Analytica who turned “whistleblower”.Ĭarroll’s doomed attempt to lift the veil from the data-industrial complex that underpinned Cambridge Analytica is the dark heart of the film. The Great Hack is the work of Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, the husband-and-wife team who made The Square, the Oscar-nominated film about the Arab spring. Wheatland describes what it was like to be inside a news tsunami: at its height, he says, they were dealing with an almost fantastical 35,000 news stories a day. But having worked for more than a year to bring Wylie forward, it’s fascinating for me now to glimpse how the scandal continued to unfold. But, in the film, Wheatland conveniently glosses over Cambridge Analytica’s more singular attributes, such as offering “electoral services” that included entrapment using Ukrainian prostitutes and admitting to bribing officials in Caribbean elections. It’s true that, since the scandal broke, we have discovered that Facebook was leaking data all over the place over many years. It just sucks to me that it’s Cambridge Analytica.” Cambridge Analytica didn’t decide democracy was for sale. There was always going to be a Cambridge Analytica. “This technology is going on unabated and will continue to go on unabated. “This is not about one company,” Julian Wheatland, the ex-chief operating officer of Cambridge Analytica, claims at one point. This week sees the release of The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary that is the first feature-length attempt to gather all the strands of the affair into some sort of narrative – though it is one contested even by those appearing in the film. It was a media firestorm that’s yet to be extinguished, a year on from whistleblower Christopher Wylie’s revelations in the Observer and the New York Times about how the company acquired the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users in order to target them in political campaigns.
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