Philippine E-Journals

Monsters we are (should be) afraid of: A documentary review of ‘The Great Hack’

Reyjane Calicdan-del Campo

Discipline: media studies

 

Abstract:

Social media is a transformative technological innovation that has altered the digital culture and practices of its stakeholders. Social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and others alike have eternally altered our forms of self-expression, interpersonal communication, and capitalist structures through the rise of platform capitalism. This review of the documentary ‘The Great Hack’ looks into the horrors and unethical processes of the digital industries, such as Facebook. In particular, the paper unpacks Cambridge Analytica’s case and its impact on the digital citizens’ data privacy, unconsented subjection to algorithmic AI profiling and propaganda, and the Philippine election as a supposedly democratic process. The elaboration of the great hack process is juxtaposed with mythological creatures as to how they have evolved in the modern digital world. The digital boogeyman on our black screens through the social media platforms is real, and we allow it to take our precious data. Platform capitalists and disinformation architects, as viscera suckers, suck out the life in us through our attention, time, and critical thinking. Generative Large- Language Model Artificial Intelligence, or GoLLeM AI monsters, curates our digital reality and is used as a perception-wielding instrument for propagandist rhetoric and benefit. The capitalist platform, through its systemic manufacturing of social media consumers’ consent, paves the way for unethical data harvesting, analysis, and processing. Exposing ill practices of capitalist platforms, conscientious social media usage, digital media literacy, and continuous lobbying for data rights on a global scale are some of the possible solutions to the systemic problem of humans and society in the dawn of the AI epoch.