Plan for Week of - Jan 18-21 2021 Term Project Work & Tech Film Reviews

Term Project Work Time Jan 18 + 19 + 20 Re: Assign 18 Teams 

Dustin - The Great Hack - Netflix Thursday Jan 21 - 

Intro: A documentary about the rise and fall of 'Cambridge Analytica,' the British consulting company that fed the online Trump propaganda machine and was also linked to affecting the results and outcome regarding Brexit. 

"The Great Hack" a documentary about data-mining, fake-news propaganda, and the 2016 election. (Trump). 

Highlights: Cambridge Analytica not only got the data that the public shared on social media, but according to the terms of their EULA (end-user license agreement), they also were able to scrape data from the public profiles of a user’s social graph. That distinction may seem fine, but the company was able to use that data to build out psychological profiles of the American voter (possibly and most likely significantly affecting the 2016 US Election outcomes in favour of Trump).

Main Character/Focus: Brittany Kaiser.

Kaiser, previously a campaign intern for Barack Obama, took her social media experience from the blue team over to the red team. In her role with Cambridge Analytica, working for the campaigns of Ted Cruz and then Donald Trump, she used the same playbook to influence elections at scale.

The idea was to take the data available from users’ social graphs to reshape and rebuild the information they consumed so as to influence the way they voted in the election. That information was not always factual or unbiased, but it was used effectively.

That makes Kaiser a central character, and indeed she plays the part of villain, hero, martyr, confused protagonist, and many more over the course of the documentary. Her role is ultimately to reflect on her actions at Cambridge Analytica and how her testimony and whistle-blowing would help shape our view of elections in the social media age.

Overall, the film is a really stark wakeup call for those who use social networks on a daily basis — so, pretty much all of us — and makes you wonder if and how your data is being used against you. Or, more seriously, whether you can be manipulated. 

In a nutshell, we trade our privacy and data for the “free” usage of the platforms. Sure, there is no such thing as a free lunch, but no one expected the lunch to include a side of psychological warfare.

Group Work - Discussion Questions - For those working from home please review the linked questions and email me your responses to ahathorn@sd19.bc.ca :) Thanks

*We finished class - with the History of Punctuation - Netflix - Explained.