Netflix has released the trailer for The Great Hack, a Netflix original documentary based on the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook’s role in the US Presidential Elections, in an attempt to let a larger audience view it after its world premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
It has been described on its website as: “The Great Hack uncovers the dark world of data exploitation with astounding access to the personal journeys of key players on different sides of the explosive Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal.”
Directed by Academy Award-nominees, Amer and Noujaim, the film is produced by Geralyn Dreyfous, Judy Korin and Pedro Kos.
The Great Hack director, Jehane Noujaim, is an Academy Award-nominated director and one of two non-fiction directors to have won the Directors Guild Award twice. Her Oscar-nominated film, The Square (2013), won the Audience Award both at Sundance and Toronto.
The Great Hack will look into how Cambridge Analytica scraped the data of approximately 87 million Facebook users to target advertising for Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
In the scandal, Cambridge Analytica – the data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
The documentary follows David Caroll, a professor in Parsons School of Design, former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser. Interviews of The Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who first exposed the scandal and the company’s former chairman Julian Wheatland will also help put together the details of the massive data breach.
It will premiere on Netflix on July 24.
Watch the trailer below: