Overall I found Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism incredibly disturbing. One of the things that stood out to me the most was the facial recognition software. This makes me think of deepfakes and how much they have evolved in recent years. I have seen deepfakes that are so convincing that I didn’t realize it wasn’t a real video until reading the description. These videos aren’t even hidden or hard to find- they are common on mainstream platforms such as YouTube and Tiktok. The videos I have seen are often of a celebrity or a political figure. While these videos are usually just jokes, the implications of this technology are disturbing to say the least. Even on a personal scale, someone could create a video of you saying something that could result in you losing a job or destroying your reputation.
The other thing that disturbed me the most about this video was the concept of the unknown ’third party’. Data is sent from the known company to third party companies, which then send it to other companies, and on and on. Our data could be being used for anything, perhaps even things that are beyond the general public’s scope of comprehension. One such example is the imprisonment of Muslims in China. By posting an innocent photo on Facebook, you could actually be contributing to a human rights violation. This is the real problem- not that your data could be sold to an advertiser, but that it can be used for something unimaginable that goes against your morals and your humanity.
In “Is The Internet Good or Bad? Yes.” one of the main points of focus was the use of Twitter during the protests in Istanbul. Zeynep discussed how major news channels such as CNN Turkey ignored the protests completely, while Twitter was filled with information and first hand videos of the protests. This is very similar to what happened in June 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement. I was following the protests closely on Twitter, but even if I hadn’t been, my timeline was filled with videos of police brutality happening at these protests. The most shocking thing was that many news channels, even the more liberal ones like CNN, were not airing these videos or covering these protests to even near the same extent. My parents, who do not have any social media, were following the protests only from the news and were shocked to hear about the content of some of these videos. Although the news was reporting on it, Twitter was able to give a much more comprehensive and accurate account of what was actually happening at that moment, without the sugarcoating that the mainstream media was giving it.