“The Great Hack” is a misinformed documentary about misinformation

By L.M.

A HACK, as it is commonly understood, is when someone stealthily gains access to a computer system using vulnerabilities in the code or by tricking a gullible user into revealing their credentials. Asking a user of a computer or social network to click on an “I agree” button and then harvesting their data in order to influence them is not a hack. It is the business model of the internet.

Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct political consultancy that was at the heart of an exposé by the New York Times and the Observer of sloppy privacy practices at Facebook, no more hacked into a computer than did this reviewer’s aunt. But, much like said aunt, the company displayed an uncommon interest in people’s personal lives, and was only too happy to share that information with others. Viewers ought to suspect from the title alone that “The Great Hack”, a documentary about Cambridge Analytica and “the dark side of social media”, is likely to be a bit over-the-top. And it is.

The film focuses on three characters. David Carroll (pictured) is an American professor who asked Cambridge Analytica for the information it held on him, exercising a right enshrined in Britain’s Data Protection Act of 1998 and normally understood to be reserved for Europeans. (The Information Commissioner’s Office agreed with his reading of the law that the right applies to anyone whose data are processed in the United Kingdom.) Carole Cadwalladr is a journalist for the Observer in London: her stories on Cambridge Analytica captured the public imagination in 2018 and subsequently led to multiple inquiries and investigations in Britain and America, the eventual demise of the company and the continuing scrutiny of Facebook by both media and governments. Brittany Kaiser is a former business-development director for Cambridge Analytica, as well as a campaigner for Barack Obama turned conservative political operative. Her lack of moral compass and shaded intentions make her the most interesting figure of the lot. Thankfully, she gets the most screen time. Less happily, the makers take everything she—and everyone else—says at face value.

When Mr Carroll says that online advertising is a trillion-dollar industry, he goes unchallenged. (It is much smaller.) When Ms Kaiser claims that “last year data surpassed oil in its value”, the film-makers put that on their website. (No such measure exists.) When Ms Cadwalladr notes that “conducting large-scale analysis of a population and then identifying the triggers that are going to move them from one state to another state...feels very challenging to…the idea of democracy”, nobody points out that that is the definition of advertising. Large chunks of the film are made up of Cambridge Analytica sales decks, which the directors appear to take as gospel truth about how sophisticated and successful the company was. So credulous is “The Great Hack” that if Cambridge Analytica had not shut down, its bosses would be using the movie as a testimonial.

It is unclear, to this reviewer at least, what the point is of “The Great Hack”. If it is to use Cambridge Analytica to bring to a wider audience the reality that tech companies exploit their users’ data and are often indiscriminate in the ways in which they go about it, then it is merely beating a severely ill horse. This much is, by the middle of 2019, common currency, thanks in large part to Ms Cadwalladr’s reporting. Even lay citizens today are familiar with misinformation and clickbait on social networks. Among more involved observers, it is facial recognition and artificial intelligence that now elicit the most worry.

The film’s near-exclusive focus on Cambridge Analytica is strange, too. It may make for a neat narrative arc, with a clear end point when the company folds, but that means “The Great Hack” is barely able to address the problems of the broader ad ecosystem, or why the web today is such a wretched place. When it does, eventually, broaden out, it does so using innuendo and conflating different things, spookily intoning about Russians or populists. Propaganda campaigns on Whatsapp in Brazil may be a problem, but they have little to do with the data-mining, ad-serving or algorithmic content recommendations that plague Facebook and its ilk.

That Cambridge Analytica gained access to the Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans through sneaky means, did not delete the information when asked, was able to create detailed profiles and glean insights that informed political strategy for election-winning candidates, and, moreover, that it was just one small part of an online ad industry that surveils everybody on the planet through questionable consent is a story worth telling. It would have been worth telling well, too.

Perhaps “The Great Hack” is the documentary the Facebook era deserves. Like an argument on the social network, it is tedious, seemingly complicated but intellectually underdeveloped, crammed with false facts and exaggerated statistics and features several blowhards who veer between self-righteous and self-congratulatory. Like one of those arguments, nobody comes out looking good in the end.

“The Great Hack” is available on Netflix from July 24th