Film

The Great Hack

A brisk, alarming documentary that turns the Cambridge Analytica scandal into a thriller with real stakes, following a whistleblower, a journalist, and a data broker as the Brexit and Trump campaigns become case studies in psychological targeting. It's clear, urgent, occasionally infuriating television, built for anyone who has ever wondered exactly how much of their own opinion was manufactured.

TMDb rating6.9

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The Social Dilemma2020

Tech insiders who built the algorithms turn on their own creations, explaining exactly how attention is harvested and behaviour nudged — the natural next stop after this film's data-brokering horror show.

But Its dramatised subplot is clunky and the warnings can feel repetitive if you've already absorbed the basic argument.

The Social Dilemma poster

Citizenfour2014

The Snowden story filmed as it happened, in a hotel room, with the same slow dread of watching a whistleblower realise how much power they've just taken on.

But It's quieter and more procedural than a scandal doc — long stretches of two people talking, not much visual drama.

Citizenfour poster

Brexit: The Uncivil War2019

A dramatised look at the Leave campaign's data-driven strategy, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, that fills in the political machinery this documentary only glimpses from outside.

But It's sympathetic to its strategist protagonist in ways that might grate if you want villains held to account, not admired for cleverness.

Brexit: The Uncivil War poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Network1976

Both are about audiences turned into product — Network just wrote the warning before the technology existed to make it literal.

A furious satire about television manufacturing outrage for ratings, decades before anyone had heard of engagement metrics — it got there first and it got there louder.

But It's theatrical and shouty by design, a 1970s idea of prophecy rather than a measured argument.

Network poster
More like this (8)

Spotlight2015

The best modern film about journalists patiently assembling an unwinnable-seeming story, which is exactly what Carole Cadwalladr is doing here — the same unglamorous, vital work.

But No hacking, no tech, no data — this is old-fashioned investigative reporting about a different institution entirely.

Spotlight poster

The Social Network2010

The origin story of the platform whose data this whole scandal ran on, sharp and cynical about ambition, betrayal, and what Facebook was built to do from day one.

But It's a courtroom-flavoured character drama, not an investigation — the privacy politics are background, not the point.

The Social Network poster

Icarus2017

Starts as a personal doping experiment and spirals into a state conspiracy, with the same queasy feeling of a filmmaker realising they've stumbled into something enormous.

But Sport and drug testing are a world away from data and elections — the connection is structural, not topical.

Icarus poster

Zero Days2016

Alex Gibney's forensic account of the Stuxnet cyberweapon shows digital warfare fought quietly, invisibly, between nations — a sibling story of tech turned to political ends.

But Dense with technical detail about malware and centrifuges; patience required if code isn't your thing.

Zero Days poster

Dark Money2018no page yet

An investigation into untraceable political spending in Montana that shows the analogue cousin of data manipulation — money instead of algorithms, buying the same outcome.

But Small-scale and local in focus; less globally dramatic than a Facebook-Trump-Brexit triple scandal.

All the President's Men1976

The template for every journalist-uncovers-the-conspiracy story since, tense and procedural, proving that some scandals just need two reporters and a lot of persistence.

But Nothing digital here at all — it's the pre-internet ancestor, slower-paced and rooted firmly in its Watergate era.

All the President's Men poster

HyperNormalisation2016

Same subject — manufactured consent, engineered narrative — but told as essay-film rather than investigation, zooming out from one scandal to the whole century.

Adam Curtis's sprawling archival essay argues that politicians and technologists have spent decades constructing a fake, manageable version of reality for us to live inside.

But No talking heads, no plot, just hypnotic collage and a narrator's voice — it demands trust in a very different, slower kind of filmmaking.

HyperNormalisation poster

The Lives of Others2006

Strips the data scandal down to its emotional core: what it actually feels like, on both sides, to have a stranger quietly know everything about you.

A Stasi officer assigned to surveil a writer in East Berlin slowly finds his own conscience compromised by the intimacy of watching someone's private life.

But It's a slow, melancholy drama in German, decades removed from smartphones — the surveillance is analogue, human, unbearably close.

The Lives of Others poster

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Recommended by

The Century of the Self, The Social Dilemma, Navalny, Coded Bias, Boys State, Zero Days, HyperNormalisation, Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal