On July 24, 2019, a buoyant Boris Johnson swept past crowds shouting “Bollocks to Brexit! Bollocks to Boris!” and was ushered into the hushed splendor of Buckingham Palace. There, he shook hands with the antique, bejeweled Queen Elizabeth II, and became the prime minister of Great Britain, elected not by popular mandate but by members of his Conservative Party. That same day, on the other side of the Atlantic, a frail and reluctant Robert Mueller took his oath before giving public testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, and later the House Intelligence Committee, on a controversial and difficult twenty-two-month-long investigation—made more challenging by multiple witnesses’ lying under oath—in which he had painstakingly examined Russian interference in the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
That day was also chosen by Netflix for the worldwide release of the documentary by filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, The Great Hack. Within a week, millions of viewers had watched it. For many, this was their first exposure to the links between the political upheavals on both sides of the Atlantic. The documentary almost certainly alarmed many more people than Mueller’s testimony did. July 24 was as close as we have got so far to a day of reckoning with the nefarious activity designed to manipulate voters in both the UK and the US in 2016.
The primary focus of The Great Hack is the infamous and now insolvent data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for the Trump campaign as well as the Leave.EU campaign promoting Brexit. Among various legally questionable activities was the company’s harvesting of huge quantities of data from Facebook in ways unknown to that platform’s millions of users. This data, used to target voters with specific “messages”—in many cases, a euphemism for outright lies—was a powerful propaganda tool, although the precise extent of its influence on electoral outcomes in Britain or the US is incalculable.
The hero of The Great Hack is Carole Cadwalladr, a British journalist for The Observer and The Guardian who broke the Cambridge Analytica story, and in so doing, has had to brave waves of misogynistic abuse, hate campaigns on social media, and numerous bullying legal threats (some still current). Together with colleagues at The New York Times, Cadwalladr was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for their joint reporting.
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