‘The Great Hack’
Netflix’s ”The Great Hack” is one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. It explains what happened with the whole Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, and makes it easy to understand for those with little prior knowledge. They take a largely nonpartisan look at how these companies were able to influence the 2016 U.S. General Election, the Brexit Referendum in the U.K., and dozens of other elections in smaller countries.
It has never been clearer that the technology we all take for granted has been taking advantage of us; it is evident that data aggregated by Facebook and exploited by Cambridge Analytica has been used to effectively brainwash the public, and the tactics they’ve used were even more efficient and dangerous than the ones utilized by the propagandists of the Third Reich. Nearly all of the blame for the explosively divisive nature of those elections belongs at the feet of Alexander Nix and Mark Zuckerberg.
“The Great Hack” very well may be the most important film of the decade, and I urge everyone to watch it. Make a concerted effort to be open minded, and don’t immediately rule out the possibility that these companies may have pulled one over on you—it’s easy to dismiss their alleged wrongdoings on the basis of “well if anyone had convinced me to think one way or the other, I think I would know.” The problem is that many people do dismiss it on those grounds, but by the very nature of what they’ve done, nobody could know until it’s too late. These are companies with billions of dollars at their disposal and a team of scientists who possess deep knowledge of how the human brain works—there is no shame in admitting they may have duped you. They certainly got me. What’s most important is what we do now that we know what they’ve done.
I’ve been pounding the #deletefacebook drum since well before the scandal broke, and there has never been a better time to get out of their corrosive network: delete your Facebook account. However, even that isn’t enough at this point.
The safety and integrity of every democracy on earth depends on everyone understanding what these companies did and calling upon our representatives to finally limit the boundless power that big tech companies have over our data. If those things don’t happen, the world will never see another free and fair election.