TBH the documentary was overly long and really cemented itself as one following the Cadwalladr narrative for Brexit, the weird notion that Trump and Brexit winning was just down to people misusing data.
Really frustrating stuff. It felt very much like journalists and tech people who ‘got out’ bemoaning how these things had gone down and trying to make a Watergate out of it all. There’s no context at all: This is the sort of thing my mum would watch and come away just thinking all of this happened because of Facebook and datapoints, as if (a) propaganda was a new thing and (b) social context didn’t matter at all.
Stuff near the end from Cadwalladr’s TED Talk (!) where she tries to imply this is ending democracy and it’s not about Left or Right etc. but clearly it is. If this big data had been used to get Bernie into power and and the US had brought in an NHS, or if Ed Miliband had been pushed to victory in 2015, none of these people would care.
A much better documentary would have shown why this sort of modern propaganda was worse than propaganda used in the last 100 years in elections. On top of that, it should examine how important this data was to doing what was necessary even now. If you listen to this story on This American Life
this guy did stuff without the use of Big Data, he just knew the people in general. i.e. is what we’re discussing her any different to times of old? It’s just the tools are different.
And a better one would have examined how the world had been gradually disenfranchising more and more people via neoliberalism.
Meh.