Arendt Center Movie Night: The Great Hack

This event occurred on:  The most valuable asset on Earth, however simple and unglamorous it sounds, is data; and the reason is: in large quantities, it can be used to predict the personality and behavioral patterns of every adult US citizen. Cambridge Analytica, a private intelligence company that played an enormous role in seemingly unrelated events such as Brexit and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign targeted persuadable voters with customized content on social media to manipulate their political decision making process. They used data to prey on millions of people’s fears, emotions, and concerns, spreading lies, conspiracies and fake news to advance their own political interests.

The Great Hack exposes the global crisis of our democracies around the world and the growingly subtle methods by which people could be subjugated to tyranny. This screening is a preliminary event for the HAC Conference, Rage and Reason: Democracy Under the Tyranny of Social Media, which has as one of its keynote speakers, Frances Haugen, who blew the whistle on Facebook in 2021, releasing an extensive report and claiming that there were conflicts of interest between the public good and Facebook’s profits.