This past week, I watched a Netflix documentary called The Great Hack. It exposes the dark side of social media and focuses on how the data company Cambridge Analytica used data mining to exploit people's personal information on social media to persuade people to vote for Donald Trump in the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016. The Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in the election in 2016. The data company used Facebook in order to retrieve everyone's personal information and with everything they had on people, they were able to identify their personality to get people to vote a certain way. They did this by flooding people's social media feeds with constant advertisements. With evidence from former employees of Cambridge Analytica, a case was formed against them forcing them to shut down their company. Not only did Cambridge Analytica manipulate the U.S. elections in 2016, but they also did for so many different elections in different countries.
In our generation, we are so tied to social media that we don't realize how much of our personal information we're putting out there. For example, the personal messages we send can be seen by these data companies. This movie does a great job exploiting the side of social media no one sees or realizes. It's an eye-opening and crazy movie. I would recommend this movie to anyone who's interested in seeing how powerful data is now. Data has become the most valuable asset in the world, beating oil.
