"We are now the commodity," Carroll — an American professor who sued Cambridge Analytica in the U.K. seeking to reclaim his data — says in voiceover at the outset, discussing a trillion-dollar data industry that has surpassed oil as the world's leading asset. In the crush to capitalize on all the benefits that technology offered, he notes, "No one bothered to read the terms and conditions."Directors Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim then meticulously proceed, with the pacing and filmmaking style of what feels like a '70s paranoid thriller, to detail Cambridge Analytica's role in the US presidential election and Brexit votes, being led through the process by Carroll, journalists and former employees turned whistleblowers Christopher Wylie and Brittany Kaiser.The challenge, of course, is to deal with what transpired in the kind of layman's terms that won't cause eyes to glaze over. Wylie effectively does that in discussing how Cambridge was able to create a "full-service propaganda machine." In a leaked sales presentation, executives pitch the company as s a "behavior-change agency" — offering "the holy grail of communications" by promising to move the needle among those who fall into the persuadable category.Kaiser, meanwhile, is tracked down "somewhere in Thailand," where she details how the combination of money and CEO Alexander Nix's charm swayed her to work for Cambridge Analytica, which, as Wylie describes it, gave former Trump campaign chief Steve Bannon the weapon that he desperately wanted "to fight his culture war."Even skeptics of the extent of Cambridge Analytica's impact on elections in the US and UK should be alarmed by the conversation about the ways social media has been effectively turned into a propaganda tool, while tech companies — especially Facebook — seemed unconcerned as long as the checks kept clearing, until they were publicly exposed and shamedRead More – Source
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