Hacker Cinema
The Great Hack
2019 · Film · documentary · 115 min
Directed by Karim Amer, Jehane Noujaim
Explore how a data company named Cambridge Analytica came to symbolize the dark side of social media in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
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20 comments on Hacker News
I believe the context I was proposing would be at the scale of world-wide manipulation. Rigging elections and such. There is a Netflix documentary called "The Great Hack" that gets into what I am discussing though from the perspective of social media algorithm. This only gets more effective when people are chatting with an AI bot that mimics a human and they think is their significant other that laughs at all their jokes and strokes their ego.
I think your interpretation would be more along the line of making 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid's Tale a reality.
[1] Overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal
[2] Documentary: "The Great Hack" (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4736550/
Dive into the world of marketing with these top Netflix picks for 2024!
First up, "The Social Dilemma," a gripping exploration of social media's impact on society.
Next, "The Great Hack," revealing the dark truths of data exploitation in marketing.
Then, "Abstract: The Art of Design," offering invaluable insights into design and user experience.
And finally, "Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened," a cautionary tale in event marketing.
Each film provides unique lessons to enhance your marketing strategies and connect with consumers. So grab some popcorn, relax, and let the learning begin!
There is a movie on Netflix [1] that covers this in more depth called The Great Hack.
[1] - https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542
The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack documentaries on Netflix cover this in greater detail but basically they don't need to read your messages, when the can predict your behaviour so accurately. IMHO this is actually worse than reading your messages.
https://www.indiewire.com/2019/11/ida-the-great-hack-documentary-1202186194/
This whole thing exposed how the platform was gamed. That's what I'm referring to. This sort of thing is being done in large and small ways all the time, and there's no chance that Facebook and Twitter are doing enough to detect it, because it's in their financial interests NOT to.
A lot of this is described in the book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by author Professor Shoshana Zuboff[1]. There’s also a good documentary on Netflix (I forget which, I think it’s ‘The Great Hack’[2]), explaining how the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ scandal utilised personal data and more importantly behaviour.
They’re just scarily good at predicting what you are going to do. They’re not listening in. It’s far scarier/more insidious than that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism
[2] https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80117542
In my opinion, Google is more of a monitoring station for governments, [1] as is Facebook [2]. I agree that they do not hold the power to directly levy taxes or enforce compliance on their own accord. They can probably influence voting and other aspects of public perception. Netflix has a show called "The Great Hack" [3] that starts to go down this rabbit hole as well.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbKxUYl3WSE
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shpiVm1qpnw
[3] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4736550/
This documentary got nominated for tons of awards. And it heavily insinuates that the election was stolen/cheated and the outcome could have been different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hack
“The Great Hack” documentary captures how Cambridge Analytica takes the 10s of thousands of data points per person to identify opportunities to divide people and the design a misinformation campaign that will resonate with each faction.
People and groups with strongly held beliefs are not the most affected by algorithms, as you are pointing out. Worst case scenario is that their echo chamber becomes less impenetrable or that they become even more extreme.
Algorithms does most damage to people not currently holding any strong beliefs about any given topic, but do have some wage leanings one way or another. These people can be swung and their views amplified and radicalized without much effort or financial input, as the film The Great Hack makes a good case for.
Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter (who all offers fine-grained ad targeting) can be weaponized to push "normal" people towards the extreme, and pit groups against each other and affect democratic processes in a big way. This was Cambridge Analytica's business model, and it worked really well.
It is great indeed. The only thing that disappointed me was the way they presented the increase in depression data. They mention that there was a 100 and something percent of increase, which is a percentage of 2 percentages.
Other than that, I think that it brings to light what (possibly) happens behind the covers of those systems, as it's always trying to get you back on the platform. I remember that every time I get a notification about something.
This film and The Great Hack form a great duo, in my opinion.
Commenters here gave great recommendations. I'll try mentioning the unmentioned.
- Gifted (2017):
Drama about a single man raising a genius girl. Some small bits of the film explore about the responsibility of extraordinary people vs their right to feel like normal human, but most of the film is about the human aspect of it.
- The Wind Rises (2013):
The Ghibli Studio film dramatizing the story of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of Mitsubishi A5M fighter aircraft and its successor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. This is one of Ghibli film that is more grounded to reality than the others.
- Sorry to Bother You (2018):
Black Comedy Drama about a young black telemarketer who are really good at his jobs, gets involved in a huge corporate conspiracy where he must choose between profit and joining his activist friend.
- Don't fuck with cats (2019):
Documentary about people over the internet brings down the infamous murderer Luka Magnotta.
- The Great Hack (2019):
A great documentary for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
- Justice League (2017):
Please don't flag, I'm not joking! The film itself didn't change anything. It was a little under my expectation. What happens following the release of the film, though, is the gem. The snydercut movement is a very rare phenomenon where a significant amount of people actually take action against disappointment from a change in a film's direction. Long story short, fans investigate how it could be and uncovered a great deal of what they think a miss-handling of a film production. It opened a window where we can see how moviemakers and everyone involved has their own political agenda and some actually falls for what they do. The movement is actually successful considering it has the power for the film industry to react and the fans seems to get what they wanted.
I got a lot of friends who really don't care about their privacy, they download every app, sign up for whatever, etc.
The way I explain to them about privacy, especially if they are left leaning, is by giving them example of 2016 elections. I explain how companies can use bits of info scatter around the web to create a detailed profiles of them. Then they can run different experiments on groups of similar profiles/people and see what message will trigger them to take an action. The action might be to buy coffee or to vote for someone.
Some people say that they have free will and they will not be easily influenced. Which leads to different debate but I recommend them that they watch "The Great Hack" documentary.
After having seen The Great Hack https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9358204/ over the weekend, it's hard to imagine how the scope expanded again. They used the developing countries all over the world as practice for UK brexit and US's 2016 elections.
"The dangers of making individual predictions from our collective characteristics" is a major area of research, especially in adtech, and the "Great Hack" documentary has showed us how well some have gotten at this for a slice of the population. A critical question for the future of data science is: "can a person really change?" And "how can we determine if they have?"
> Unfortunately, the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal also has renewed a very old and disabling fable embraced by many well-meaning people on the left, which is that Americans (and others overseas) keep voting for right-wing authoritarians because they are being manipulated by the media.
This sets the precedent of the entire article, and avoids mentioning the circumstances around the Bush Al Gore election of 2000.
And unfortunately, it also ends with such polarizing words:
> The Great Hack wants to make its viewers care about data rights and the dangers of modern misinformation campaigns but unfortunately is itself a slick piece of misinformation that plays artfully on the prejudices and misunderstandings rife in its targeted audience. If the weaponization of misinformation was such a powerful tool for changing hearts and minds, why did the left win recent elections in Mexico and Istanbul? Why did Democrats retake the House in 2018? We aren’t losing the war for the future because of some new media masterminds. If we’re losing, it’s because our message—and messengers—aren’t connecting.
Because 'the left' isn't excluded in social media manipulation. The narrative that 'the left' (whatever that exactly is) is somehow crying wolf is quite clear, and also tells the observer who this article is trying to convince (hint: those who got manipulated)
> The film gives an inordinate amount of attention to Brittany Kaiser, a Democrat who worked for CA’s US branch as its business development director and then—after the revelations of the Facebook breach—apparently had an attack of conscience.
They're omitting the data scientist who started whistleblowing. The very same data scientist who said in a Tweet which is quoted, that Kaiser was no whistleblower.
Does Kaiser get a lot of attention in this documentary? Yes. Is it unwarranted? I don't know. Is it all positive, is she put in a positive light alone? No way. If you watch the documentary carefully, you can find examples where she is being criticized. The description of events of her 180 u-turn is not pleading her free at all.
> According to her, until CA started working for Trump in June 2016, his campaign had no data infrastructure or digital marketing apparatus and no digital strategy. The implication, never blatantly stated but simply conveyed by all the tricks of modern documentary-making—striking digital graphics meant to illustrate how our data leaks into the hands of others, ominous music, and alluring close-ups of Kaiser as she watches the scandal unfold on television—is that Trump won because Cambridge Analytica gave him a secret edge.
> All of this is garbage. Kaiser first worked in politics as an intern on the 2008 Barack Obama campaign, helping its social media team, but The Great Hack implies that she ran his whole Facebook operation.
Classic straw man, keywords being: implication, implies.
The amount of people who had to be manipulated were carefully chosen, and had to be very little amount in US thanks to the way the election system works (with the districts).
Agree with the article's criticism of the heavy focus on Brittany Kaiser. It felt like the filmmakers were trying to put her into Snowden or Assange type circumstances, and then use those circumstances to manufacture credibility and heighten suspense. I have difficulty with the scene about a news article breaking that mentions her. Shes groaning about her career being over, but you can tell shes really excited to be in the spotlight. Assange comes off equally self-centered in the Poitras documentary, but in that case the magnitude of circumstances had already been established, along with his central role in those circumstances. The filmmakers behind 'Great Hack' never reached those levels of clarity regarding involvement, and as a result their decision to use Kaiser as primary subject felt misleading.
> The Great Hack
I found the title to be self-fulfilling. That documentary was awful! It's just a tag along the journey of a smart narcissist to cover her ass.
Why aren't we talking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal example? Another issue of the Electoral colleges is that a candidate could target only a few amount of people (70k according to the documentary) for changing the course of the election. Even if this has been fixed by Facebook. Shouldn't it be considered as a major flaw of the election system?
Source: "The great Hack" - Netflix doc.