Doing the job I do I thought I knew a lot about AI and algorithms and how companies use your data, but this blew me out of the water!

I don’t want to give too much of this documnetary away so I won’t but one thing I have to speak on is how AI changes how you see news and this is one thing I never really thought of!

AI is able to work out what news you gravitate to, wjhether it be left or right wing, whether the earth is flat or round, all that sort of stuff and then tailor what you see. I did always wonder how people could be so deep in the hole of conspiracy or how people could have such different views than I do, it’s because they are seeing news in such a differet way to myself.

For example, on Twitter I could be exposed to news degrading Trump and calling him an idiot and saying how bad he is while others could be shown the exact same news story but in a whole different light praising him and saying what a good job he is doing,

Let’s take it back to the UK elections where conservatives won with a landslide, all over my Twitter all I saw was people praising Labour and talking about how great Labour is and how they will be voting Labour, to then see the results and see how many people actually voted Conservatives it really surprised me. But now it doesn’t, because clearly Twitter wasn’t going to show me the Conservative side of thijngs and instead show likeminded people like me. I never realised how much social media can skew even the smallest of things to make it more suseptible to you and have you enjoy it rather than show you the bigger picture which you may not enjoy as much.

I also never realised the impact of what fake news could do. Fake news can tear down whole eco systems and ways in which governments run. It can ruin entire countries and cause people to uprise over things that aren’t what they appear to be online. Social media seems to have so much power and it’s not just girls feeling insecure or depression rates going up, it’s our whole structure of the world and civilisation being torn to ruins just because enough people believe something they see online.

This documentary is utterly fascinating and I want everyone I know to watch it and see what power social media has over our lives. We may see it as a small miniscuel thing but in the grand scheme of things, it could cause chaos.

What do you think?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding