In the 1962 film “The Manchurian Candidate,” based on the 1959 Richard Condon novel, Frank Sinatra plays major Ben Marco, a Korean War vet who spends the film unraveling a Communist plot that included the brainwashing of one of his men, Raymond Shaw. Marco learns that the communists programmed Shaw to carry out any command, including the assassination of the President of the United States. All they need to trigger Shaw is to show him the Queen of Diamonds. Both the novel and the film, in addition to being good yarns, do a great job of capturing a multiplicity of fears from that time: mind control and subliminal messages, Communism and rapacious, corrupt politicians who’d gladly side with Communists to further their own attempts to acquire power. The revelations last week that a UK-based, political consultancy that traded primarily in manipulating people using their Facebook data has no small relation to “The Manchurian Candidate.” No one was forced to undergo mind control experiments in a Chinese compound, but like Ben Marco, we’re all starting to put together a plot to control Americans through targeted messages, some of which were ordered up by the Russian government to influence the last Presidential election. It’s hard to say those words out loud without recognizing how preposterous the scenario is. It’s almost as fantastic as Condon’s plot. It’s also, I think, difficult to wrap our heads around the idea that people are simple enough to be gently manipulated with nothing more than misleading information. The science behind what the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica attempted to do to voters is not conclusive. What the firm said it would do is build psychological profiles of voters and then feed those voters ads based on what it thought would be more persuasive based on that psychological profile. Those profiles were developed using Facebook data it harvested. Recent tests of that method by scientists found that voters really aren’t that easily persuaded by targeted ads. At best, it’s difficult to say that these ads had any real effect on the outcome. Regardless of the outcome, what is truly worth the public hysteria over the Cambridge Analytica– Facebook data scandal is the fact that the attempt to manipulate voters was made at all. The methods Cambridge Analytica used to harness data and the crassness with which they pedaled it to politicians is deplorable. Shocked, many people are responding by deleting their Facebook accounts. In a lot of ways, doing so now is little more than an act to make one feel better – an action to take back a little self-control at a time when so much seems beyond it. The cat – or, more accurately, the data – is already out of the bag. One thing to remember: if we are to be made Manchurian Candidates, it won’t be Facebook that does it, but ourselves. What this situation should show us is that we need to be a lot more careful and thoughtful about what we sign up for and what our online accounts are really up to. It might also be time to decide who has rights to our “data” and our social profiles. This is a serious business. It’s time we all took it seriously. Pete Mazzaccaro