Welcome to the Weekend Binge. Every Friday, we’ll suggest a binge-able title designed to keep you from getting too stir crazy. Check back throughout the weekend for even more gloriously queer entertainment.
The Democracy Double Feature: The Great Hack/The Social Dilemma
We don’t know about you, but after watching the nuclear implosion that was this week’s Presidential Debate, we feel a bit exhausted…not to mention nervous about the election just one month away. As such, we’re doing something a bit different at this week’s Weekend Binge, offering up a double feature of two films that go a long way to explaining our current situation.
The Great Hack chronicles the fall of Cambridge Analytica, the data company that partnered with Facebook to analyze the personal data of millions of users with the express purpose of targeting political ads. Analytica later partnered with the 2016 Trump Campaign, the pro-Brexit group Leave.EU, and most troublingly, Russian oil company Lukoil (which was later revealed to have turned data over to the Russian government for the purpose of manipulating the 2016 election). Gay activist and former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie blew the whistle on the company, which resulted in a major scandal, congressional testimony and the blood-curdling revelation that fringe groups and foreign governments had engaged in psychological warfare on the American public through manipulation of social media.
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The scandal continues in The Social Dilemma, another film which further details how social media–especially Facebook–often inadvertently–created our current polarized climate through its engagement algorithms. The movie explains that social media is programmed to show ads and stories to maximize user engagement. In simple terms, social media tells its users what it thinks they want to hear based on past activity, the activity of friends, neighbors, people living in the same cities, and so on. For users that tend to get their news from social media such as Facebook, that creates a reality based on user action, not simple facts.
Couple these to films together, and the ongoing mess of fake news, “alternative facts,” conspiracy theories and political chaos suddenly makes a lot more sense. Both films should be required viewing for the civic-minded, or anyone who’s ever used social media in the first place. We’d also add a final thought, written total sincerity: your future may depend on it.
Both films stream on Netflix.
controversial2019
I’m a big fan of privacy. I have no social media. This is the only forum to which I subscribe. I listen to The Privacy Security and OSINT podcast etc.
However I was deeply disappointed by The Social Dilemma. I don’t think it told us anything new. We’ve always known that social media sites are targeted by advertisers and those of real (not-Trump-accused) fake news. That’s all the Social Dilemma hammers home. Social media is designed to keep us on it so that we see/click adverts so they can charge advertisers more. And there’s little to no oversight of the adverts being submitted and targeted. Nothing new.
wikidBSTN
The person who wrote this is probably a twenty-something. Our politics became polarized long before the internet was even a factor. Look back to the rise of Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich and their destruction of moderate Republicans (RINO’s – Republicans In Name Only). Compromise became a dirty word and politics became a zero sum game with the rise of these two a-holes.
Kangol2
So true, though the destruction of the RINOs goes even further back to the far-right’s attacks against Dwight Eisenhower for being insufficiently anti-Communist, which culminated in the nomination of the most extreme right-wing Republican who’d ever run for the presidency, Barry Goldwater, in 1964. Goldwater lost in a landslide, both because he was so extreme and because of the national sympathy toward Lyndon Johnson after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, but by the time Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the Goldwater Republicans had advanced their takeover of the GOP. They led us to the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush (one continuous failure after another under him, culminating in a national and global economic collapse), and now the catastrophic presidency of Donald J. Conman Drumpf. Instead of ratcheting their craziness, racism, homophobia, etc. back, they keep torquing it up, to the point that utterly insane people like the QAnon crowd increasingly make up their base, Russia’s foreign policy is what their beloved Don the Con is implementing before the eyes of the entire world, and outright fascists like Bill Barr are their icons. Gingrich and his gang are a key stop, though, along their horrendous journey to the abyss.
jdr11201
Be very afraid,
The real threat in america is Mr Zuckerberg and Facebook his collection of information is more dangerous than Russia. He like Mr. Hoover FBI Director back in the 50’s & 60’s but on steroids to much info., collected is not good. 🙁