"The Great Hack"

Over the weekend I watched the new Netflix documentary The Great Hack. It tells the story of the rise and fall of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting company that married big data with military-grade psychological operations to deliver the White House for Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

The documentary is less than stunning as it follows whistle-blower Brittany Kaiser from Burning Man to a resort in Thailand and then on to London and New York as she explains her role in Cambridge Analytica.

The film works in that it convincingly shows that Trump likely won in 2016 by spending heavily on Facebook ads that were minutely targeted in key swing states thanks to data that Cambridge Analytica mined with the help of Facebook (the root cause of Facebook's $5 billion fine). Trump was spending $1 million per day on Facebook ads; in comparison, Hillary's social media advertising was a pittance.

At the end of the documentary reporter Carole Cadwalladr grafts Russiagate onto the Cambridge Analytica story by falsely attributing a political motive to a meeting that Kaiser had with Julian Assange.

The real story is that the Hillary campaign got its clock cleaned by Cambridge Analytica. (Brad Parscale, Trump's 2016 campaign’s digital director, is running his re-election.) Russian interference is just a cover created to shield blame for the Democrats' shockingly poor performance.