Documentary Review: The Great Hack

By: Anna Cave

Social media was something built to connect us, but it is now tearing us apart. ​

A lot of this is thanks to Cambridge Analytica, who defined themselves as a "behavior change company," in the Netflix documentary, 'The Great Hack.' And change behavior is exactly what they aimed to do in the 2016 election using Facebook's platform. ​

Cambridge Analytica worked with Facebook to collect data points on users. For each user, Cambridge Analytica had gathered over 5,000 points of data. It's hard to imagine even having that many characteristics or actions that could be measured online, but somehow they managed to do it.

These data points gave Cambridge Analytica the ability to predict the personality of every American, which is important because personality determines behavior, and behavior influences how you vote. Cambridge Analytica worked with Trump in the digital arm of his campaign in what was called Project Alamo. At the peak of the project, the campaign was spending a million dollars a day on Facebook ads, and these ads were targeted very specifically. 

Cambridge Analytica built a psychological profile of each voter in the United States to find out which ones were considered to be the "persuadables." The Trump campaign targeted these groups of people who were on the fence about who they were voting for or who carried characteristics that pointed to the fact that they might be persuaded to Trump. The idea of the company was that they could do a large scale analysis on the population to identify triggers people had that, when set off, might cause them to move from one way of thinking into another. Cambridge Analytica capitalized on these triggers and used them to target ads, sometimes containing fake news, to persuade a very specific group of vulnerable voters to vote for Trump. One of the aspects of this that was the most threatening to freedom, autonomy, and democracy, according to one of the speakers in the documentary, is that they not only targeted persuadable voters, but chose to hone in on those living in swing states and precincts, where their change in vote might make a bigger difference than any other area. 

The danger of this is more than a single election. The story is much bigger. Our data is out there and it is being used against us in ways we do not fully understand. We don't know how these vulnerable people were targeted because we don't know what data points caused them to be targeted, because we don't even know what data Cambridge Analytica collected on us. The process played with the psychology of an entire nation without anyone knowing. Even worse, it was done in the context of a democratic process, which is one of those most cherished pillars of America.

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But that's enough summary. Do I recommend watching 'The Great Hack'?

I would say yes, especially if you're unfamiliar with the role Cambridge Analytica played in the 2016 election. It's scary to know that our data is being used to harm us and our country, and I think this documentary brought a lot of awareness to me about how careful I need to be when consuming media. We know this happened on Facebook, but where else are we being targeted? For a more in depth look at what happened, as well as a personal narrative from Brittany Kaiser, the former business development director for Cambridge Analytica, I would say it is definitely worth it to take a couple hours out of your night to check this one out. It's fascinating, though terrifying, how much one company was able to manipulate the future of America.

To conclude this post I'd like to end with the same quote that the documentary finished with, as some food for thought:

"Can I be manipulated? Can you?"