'Facebook is a crime scene': Filmmakers show how social media used to run 'psychological experiments' on voters

Two documentary filmmakers appeared on MSNBC with Stephanie Ruhle on Thursday to discuss their latest movie about the way social media is manipulated to conduct what they described as "psychological experiments" on voters.

Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, whose new movie "The Great Hack" premieres on Netflix this week, told Ruhle that they found that companies such as Cambridge Analytica had brilliantly exploited Facebook's algorithms to push out misinformation about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

But even looking past the 2016 election, they say that Facebook has served as what amounts to a platform for unethical research about human behavior.

"I think what you both of those two issues have in common is that they both use the vulnerabilities they found in the American public via Facebook to take advantage of people, exploit people's data, and run psychological experiments without consent," Amer explained. "Facebook is now a crime scene and we have to look at it that way, and we have to be dealing with Facebook's crime scenes in a way that allow for the rule of law to protect the democratic process."

Amer went on to say that he doesn't believe Silicon Valley executives are trying to wreck democracy, but he does argue that their culture of chasing profit without considering long-term consequences has made the blind to the monster they've created.

"No oil executives used to wake up and say, 'How do we pollute the planet?'" he said. "But pollution was happening, just like there are spillover effects in other industries, we are now seeing it in technology on our society."

Watch the video below.