“The holy grail of communications is when you learn how to change behaviour,” says an executive of the data-driven communications company Cambridge Analytica (CA) in a sales presentation. The company’s rise and fall after it was exposed that it had harvested data from more than 50 million Facebook users is detailed in the newly-released Netflix documentary The Great Hack, by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer.
One of the examples given in the sales presentation is of how CA helped swing elections in Trinidad and Tobago. The two main political parties there are dominated by the Afro-Caribbeans and the Indians. To ensure the victory of the Indians, the company formulated a campaign primarily targeting the youth. Using the slogan ‘Do So, Don’t Vote’, it capitalised on the apathy of youngsters by encouraging them not to vote. It flooded the internet with videos and images promoting the campaign. “We knew the Afro-Caribbean kids would not vote because of the ‘Do So’ campaign, but the Indian kids would do what their parents told them to do, which is go out and vote,” says the executive. The difference in turnout among the youngsters of both groups was about 40 per cent. That swung the election by about six per cent, which was all that the company needed to ensure victory.
CA used such techniques of suppressing and increasing turnout in several countries like Malaysia, Lithuania, Romania, Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria. But the icing on the cake was the 2016 presidential elections in the US, in which it played a decisive role in President Trump’s victory. The company formulated the ‘Defeat Crooked Hillary’ campaign. “We came up with hundreds of different kinds of creative and put it online,” says Mark Turnbull, the managing director of CA’s political division, in a Channel 4 News undercover video. “We put information into the bloodstream… to the internet, and then watched it grow.”
When you realise the extent of CA’s tampering, you wonder whether we will ever again witness a truly free and fair election in the world. It is one of the fears voiced by Carole Cadwalladr, an investigative reporter with The Observer, in the documentary. Along with Cadwalladr, who officially broke the story in 2017, the documentary primarily focuses on the views of Brittany Kaiser, former director of business development for CA who later turns whistle-blower, and David Carroll, a professor who files a case against the company to retrieve its data on him. Although much of the CA controversy has been widely reported, the unique voices of these three people bring a fresh perspective to the story.
There were, however, some jarring notes. The opening scene of Kaiser in an oriental outfit somewhere in Nevada carving ‘Cambridge Analytica’ into a wooden pillar made no sense. Some parts of the film, especially in the latter half, were repetitive.
The Great Hack does not make any new revelations but it awakens you to the chilling realities of the data-driven world in which we live. It is doubtful whether any of us fully realise how insidiously we are being manipulated. As Carroll says in the film, “Digital traces of ourselves are being mined into a trillion dollar-a-year industry. We are now the commodity.”
Rating: 3.5/5
